Till the Cows Come Home

by Philip Walling

  The high point of Gloucestershire cheese exporting was the middle of the eighteenth century, when the rich Gloucestershire pastures were supplying great quantities both locally to Bath and Bristol, and further afield to London and the colonies in West India, New England and the Caribbean. Double Gloucester travelled best and became rightly famous. It was made with the full-cream milk of two milkings when the cows were grazing summer pastures. The orange colouring was said to have been imparted by lady’s bedstraw, which grew commonly in the ancient permanent pastures; it showed that the cheese contained high levels of beta-carotene from summer grass. But the colouring could only have been present in the milk for a small part of the year, and it would most likely have been pale yellow, not orange. In the sixteenth century, certain cheese-makers began to colour their cheese artificially by adding annatto, a vegetable colouring. This practice was then adopted by producers of Leicester, Cheddar and Cheshire, for without it their cheeses would have appeared a less attractive natural creamy colour. Thus they disguised the quality of their cheese by making it the same colour whatever the time of year, or what the cow had eaten.

  True Double Gloucester was described in 1854 as having a ‘blue coat, a golden hue on its edges, a smooth, close wax-like texture and a milk-rich flavour. It was not crumbly, did not part when toasted and softened without burning.’ Apparently the best cheese of them all was Double Berkeley, found within a ten-mile radius of Berkeley: notably at Hardwicke, Haresfield, Leonard Stanley, Slimbridge, Stonehouse, Whitminster and Frocester. This disappeared in the last century until Charles Martell revived a version of it in 1984.

  The less well-known Single Gloucester, or ‘hay-cheese’, was made from the winter milk of cows fed on hay, using whole milk from the morning’s milking mixed with skimmed milk from the previous evening’s. It tended to be eaten younger and closer to home, because it did not keep as well as Double, which was a bigger, firmer cheese, strong enough to bear the weight of the cheese factor – dealer – who would stand on each cheese; if any yielded, he would reject it as ‘hoven’ or ‘blown’.

  Even in the nineteenth century, the average Gloucester cow gave 500 gallons of milk in a lactation of around 300 days; this would make about 330 lb (150 kg) of cheese. But the cow’s potential was barely tapped because it was expected to produce milk from whatever could be grown on the farm – grass from old permanent pastures, sainfoin or clover – and hay in winter. There was no fancy feeding and the herd was seldom, if ever, housed, except for some rudimentary shelter from the worst weather.

  As an indication of what the Gloucester cow could have done under better conditions, Ladyswood Pansy 190, belonging to Lieutenant Colonel Henry Cecil Elwes of Colesbourne Park, 700 feet up on the Cotswolds, was recorded in the 1930s as giving 7,132 lb in her third lactation, 8,314 lb in her fourth and 9,214 lb in her fifth. Another cow, Colesbourne Bluebell 54, gave 6,000 lb in her first lactation, 8,712 lb in her second and 9,102 lb in her third, with 5 per cent butterfat and solids-not-fat of nearly 8.5 per cent.

  Even compared with the yield of modern dairy cows, these figures are impressive. But when we take into account that the milking ability of all commercial dairy breeds has been increased by about half in the last 50 years by selective breeding and intensive feeding of bought-in protein, we can only speculate what the Gloucester could have done if she had been bred for yield. Although there is more to it than simple yield. The art of dairying is to balance the quantity and quality of the milk over a lactation with the cost of keeping the cow and breeding replacements, the longevity and health of the beast, ease of calving, and resistance to foot troubles. On any measure, if all these factors were weighed in the scale, the Gloucester would have come out pretty near the top.

  But the Gloucester never had a chance to show what she was really made of because the breed was hit by two disasters from which it never recovered. The first was the terrible rinderpest epidemic of 1745–56. Cattle plagues were hardly unusual, but this was exceptional. The number of cattle that died or had to be slaughtered must have run into millions. In an attempt to stem the spread of the disease, the government ordered large-scale slaughter: Lincolnshire lost 100,000 cattle in 1746. Farmers were accused of flouting the slaughter policy and prolonging the disease, but it is hardly surprising when compensation was less than a third of the market value of the animal and it was far from clear that slaughter was having the desired effect. Many farmers preferred to risk their cattle catching the disease, rather than accept certain ruin by having them slaughtered.

  The disease reached Gloucestershire in 1748 with an outbreak at Forthampton, near Tewkesbury. On orders from London, the county justices took drastic action: 80,000 cattle were slaughtered, and all fairs and markets for cattle in the county were closed. It is not clear how long the closures lasted, but fresh restrictions were imposed in 1752, and by the time the disease abated, the majority of the cattle in the county (and in the wider country around) had either died or been slaughtered. This hit the Gloucester particularly hard.

  From an epidemiological perspective, rinderpest, which means ‘cattle plague’ in German, was an interesting disease. The fifth of the ten plagues of Egypt, it has flared up periodically throughout history, often at the same time as wars or civil upheaval – the 1745 outbreak accompanied the second Jacobite rising. In the 1890s, millions of cattle – 80 to 90 per cent of the entire population – died in southern Africa. The last major outbreak, in Africa between 1982 and 1984, prompted the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) to begin a worldwide eradication campaign.

  Rinderpest killed almost all animals in a herd without natural immunity and was easily passed by contact, drinking infected water and sometimes on the air. It was almost always fatal. Cattle died slowly from fever, diarrhoea and liver necrosis within six to ten days of the first symptoms. The virus originated in Asia, and gradually between AD 1000 and 1100 transmuted itself into a zoonotic disease: a disease that originally only affects animals but develops into one that is transmitted to humans (and other species). In this case it became measles in humans and canine distemper in dogs. The virus itself is highly infectious while still alive but particularly fragile and quickly destroyed by heat and sunlight.

  After the global eradication programme and the last case being reported in Kenya in 2001, the FAO declared in 2011 that rinderpest had been ‘wiped off the face of the planet’. There have been no reported cases since then. It is only the second disease in history – the other being smallpox – to have been so eliminated. It remains to be seen whether the optimism of the scientists will be borne out, because the virus has a long history of mutation. Stocks are still maintained in specialized laboratories in 24 countries, much to the disquiet of the FAO, which in 2015 called for their destruction for fear of accidental or malicious escape, something that would destroy millions of cattle, particularly in America and western Europe, where animals have lost any natural immunity.

  Although the Gloucester was hit particularly hard by the epidemic of 1745, the breed could well have recovered, given time, had there been the determination among farmers, and had it not been for the second contagion – Longhorn fever. The high prices for dairy produce caused by shortages following the rinderpest outbreak encouraged farmers to fill the vacuum with almost anything that would give milk. And after 1750, Gloucestershire farmers were too impatient to restock the empty dairies to revive their ancient breed. They simply bought cows from the nearest source, which at this time was the Midland counties. There were plenty of the old Longhorn dairy type to be had, as yet undamaged by the improvers, which gave adequate quantities of milk, high in butterfat for cheese-making, and would also satisfy the growing urban demand for beef by making a better carcase than the Gloucester.

  The Gloucestershire dairymen were so eager to restock with these Longhorns that they ignored a truth William Marshall (1745–1818), the agricultural writer, early proponent of agricultural education and rival of Arthur Young (see here), pointed out in
1789: that ‘it was the Gloucestershire breed which raised the Gloucestershire dairy to its greatest height’ and that ‘the breed had long been naturalized to the soil and situation; and certainly ought not to be supplanted, without some evident advantage, some clear gain, in the outset; nor even then, without mature deliberation; lest some unforeseen disadvantage should bring cause of repentance in the future’.

  As so often happens in life, fashion also came into it. Anybody who aspired to be at the forefront of profitable farming had to have dual-purpose cattle. The specialist Gloucester, which for centuries had filled the county’s milk pails, had made its reputation as a pre-eminent district for cheese and given the whey that fattened the Old Spot pigs in the county’s orchards, suddenly looked old-fashioned. Progressive farmers could see the future and it did not include the Gloucester cow.

  But they were mistaken. As time went on, the Longhorns coming out of the Midland counties had changed. They were not the same type they had been. What was increasingly emerging from those counties was stock that had had the milk bred out of it by Bakewell and his followers in their search for beef. This the Gloucestershire dairymen found too late, to their great cost. Professor David Low pointed out in 1842 that continual crossing over the previous half-century had turned ‘a very large part of the cattle of Britain [into] a mixture of races, having no uniformity of character, and generally defective in some important points’. Then, as the nineteenth century progressed, the beef bubble burst and the Longhorn lost whatever appeal it had had, even to the grazier. It had already disappeared from the county of its creation; not a single Longhorn remained within a dozen miles of Bakewell’s farm at Dishley, the place where the great man had once with such determination tried to create the perfect beef breed.

  The Longhorn ‘had acquired a delicacy of constitution, inconsistent with common management and keep; and it began slowly, but undeniably to deteriorate’. In other words, it had been so highly bred that it was unable to thrive under ordinary conditions of farming. ‘It would seem as if some strange convulsion of nature, or some murderous pestilence, had suddenly swept away the whole of this valuable breed.’ In fact, it had disappeared from most of its former strongholds because in its ‘improved’ form it could not compete with the rising Shorthorn either for milk yield or as a grazing animal for beef. The improvers’ work not only ruined the Longhorn; it also destroyed the hopes of a Gloucester revival. The Gloucester carried on in the hands of a few determined breeders, and demand continued for Gloucester bulls to cross with the Shorthorn to breed a high-yielding heifer, but its time seemed to have gone.

  What looked like the final chapter in the Gloucester’s story opened with the great London rinderpest epidemic of the 1860s, which killed about 80 per cent of the capital’s dairy cattle. Nineteen years earlier, in 1841, the railway from Gloucester to London had opened, and such was the metropolitan demand for clean milk that a market in ‘railway milk’ for the capital opened soon afterwards. Cows could be milked in Gloucestershire in the evening and their produce be on London doorsteps next morning at a price that paid much better than cheese-making and without the labour. And in the Shorthorn, the dairymen of the West Country had found an animal well suited to the provision of liquid milk. Cheese-making had begun its long decline, to the point that the small amount of Double Gloucester that was still being made was sold as Cheddar.

  As for the remaining Gloucesters, they would have gone the way of the Longhorn had it not been for the dukes of Beaufort at Badminton, who during the late nineteenth century gave leadership to a nucleus of breeders determined to preserve the breed. In 1909, the duke took some Gloucesters to the Royal Show, where they attracted wide interest, and by 1919 a society had been formed to promote the breed. It looked as if rehabilitation might be possible, until foot and mouth swept the county. It was said that the government’s compulsory slaughter policy worked against the Gloucester, because the white finching made the cattle easy for the slaughtermen to see in the dark and allowed them to do their work well into the night. The final blow came with the Second World War, when most of Gloucestershire’s ancient permanent pasture was ploughed up, apparently to feed the nation. By 1951, it was estimated that there were about 50 pure Gloucester cattle left, and their society had become the ‘plaything of half a dozen landed gentry’.

  By the time Charles Martell came onto the scene in the 1970s, the only remaining pure-bred herd belonged to the rather reclusive Misses Ella and Alex Dowdeswell of Wick Court, near Frampton on Severn. Their herd had survived in isolation on their farm, enfolded in a meander of the River Severn and run by the two women after the death of their brother, Eric, in April 1968. Charles Martell wrote to ask if they had any cows for sale and received a reply in less than a week saying he had just missed them: they had sold their 33-strong herd at a dispersal sale ‘yesterday’. He was devastated. He had ‘clutched at and missed something that was to be gone for ever’.

  Despite this setback, he visited and charmed the Dowdeswell sisters and with their help traced all the buyers from their marked-up sale catalogue. It became clear that the cattle had been so widely dispersed that if the breeding of those few remaining animals was not coordinated, and records kept, the breed would almost certainly be lost. At a meeting of all those interested in 1973, it was resolved to re-form the society to try to save the Gloucester from extinction.

  Joe Henson (father of Adam, of BBC Countryfile fame), who ran the Cotswold Farm Park and was a founder member of the Rare Breeds Survival Trust, had had experience of the breed when he was assistant manager at Earl Bathurst’s farm. Bathurst’s herd had grown to 170 cows, kept high up on the Cotswolds at Cold Aston. The only thing was that they were not all pure-bred, having boosted their milk yield by out-crossing. After the earl died in 1966, his herd was dispersed and Henson assumed the breed had become extinct, until three years later he read an article in Farmers Weekly about a bull called Gloucester, from the Dowdeswells’ Wick Court herd, which was having semen taken for long-term storage as he was the last-known pure Gloucester bull.

  Henson phoned Wick Court. In common with many country people of the time, the Dowdeswells didn’t see the need for inside sanitation or running water in their ram-shackle Elizabethan manor house, but they did value the telephone, which was answered by Alex. She would agree to nothing without the say-so of her older sister, Ella, and she told Henson to ring back.

  Ella was forbidding: ‘Our kid tells me you want to see our herd.’ Henson persuaded her to allow him and his business partner to visit, with the clear understanding that she would not sell him any cattle. After sherry and biscuits in the house, served with old-world courtesy, the two visitors were taken to see the cows in the fields and gave a hand to get them in for milking. One was a newly calved heifer that had never been milked before, and, rather mischievously, the sisters asked Henson (who was a city boy, the child of two actors) if he would put the teat cups on her for the first time. ‘I have never put on a cluster with greater care in my life; the heifer never moved. I had passed the test!’

  After he had helped with the milking and turning the cows out to graze, the sisters ‘got into a huddle’ and emerged to announce that they would, after all, sell their visitors two cows – ‘that one and that one’ – because they seemed like ‘nice young men’. Henson named the beasts Alex and Ella. They also allowed him to buy some semen from their bull, Gloucester, so he could inseminate the cows. Nine months later, Ella gave birth to a pair of twin bull calves, one alive, the other dead. But Alex proved to be barren. Ella had too much milk for one calf, so Henson got into the loose box to try to milk her out to relieve her discomfort. She nearly kicked him over the door and would never let anyone touch her udder thereafter.

  A year later, he visited the sisters again, and while discussing their herd, Alex asked Ella to remind her which cows they had sold their nice young men. ‘You remember? They had the barrener and the kicker.’ When Alex broke her arm in 1972, the Dowdeswells reluctantly sold
the herd and Joe Henson bought a cow called Nervous (renamed Alex) at the dispersal sale. These two cows were the foundation of his Bemborough herd using semen from Gloucester the bull.

  Meanwhile, Charles Martell set himself to making Double Gloucester cheese from the milk of three Gloucester cows, which at first he milked by hand. He sold it wherever he could: local markets, farm shops and other outlets that were opening up to meet a tentative demand for locally produced natural food. He also revived the making of Single Gloucester, which had disappeared with industrialized milk processing, and obtained ‘Protected Designation of Origin’ status, which meant the cheese could only be made in Gloucestershire, ideally using the milk from Gloucester cows, although that was not essential because there were not enough of them to satisfy the demand.