Till the Cows Come Home

by Philip Walling

  Then, in 1994, Martell invented the cheese that has made his name. Dymock is in a part of Gloucestershire north of the Severn estuary, close to the Herefordshire border, whose climate is ideal for fruit growing, particularly apples, pears and plums. Martell set about finding, cataloguing and saving as many of these as he could trace. In the process, he came up with the idea of using the perry made from one old pear variety, called Stinking Bishop, to wash and flavour the rind of a new soft cheese he was developing and to which he gave the same name. It was a stroke of genius. And when it supplanted Wensleydale as Wallace and Gromit’s cheese of choice, Charles Martell’s fortune was made. He has gone on to invent another five cheeses – seven from cow’s milk and one from ewe’s milk – all connected in some way with Gloucestershire and its history. None is sold through the major supermarkets; all go through cheese wholesalers, smaller shops or direct to the public at markets or online. He has succeeded without having anything to do with big dairies. And Prince Charles has even awarded his cheese a richly deserved royal warrant.

  Jonathan Crump is another, albeit younger, devotee who is keeping the Gloucester cow from oblivion. He started working at Wick Court after it had passed from the Dowdeswells’ ownership and become one of the Farms for City Children started by Michael and Clare Morpurgo in 1976. He brought the Gloucesters back to Wick Court in 1992, nearly 20 years after the Dowdeswells’ sale, and then moved to Standish Park Farm near Stonehouse, where he milks about 18 cows, making marvellous unpasteurized Double and Single Gloucester cheese. He is part of the Slow Food movement, which champions proper ways of rearing things, and his cheeses are authentic, made on the farm, and delicious.

  His land is on a slope of the Cotswolds looking west towards south Wales and the Bristol Channel, the fields sweeping upwards from the farm buildings. This is ideal grass-growing country, with mild winters, overlying limestone on the edge of the Vale of Berkeley, the heartland of the old Gloucester. Jonathan is a natural stockman: quiet, even-tempered and gentle with his cows. He has never wanted to do anything other than work with animals, and it is immediately obvious when you see him milking in his cowshed. Nothing is rushed; the cows amble in for milking and Jonathan calls them by name, talking to them as they let down their milk.

  This is not high-tech stuff. The byre and the milking equipment are basic and functional. The tank into which the milk goes is scrubbed stainless steel, clean and perfect for the job, but it’s not fancy. The rooms where the cheeses mature on shelves are simple and have not cost a lot of money. Yet the cheese is wonderful and Jonathan has a market for everything he makes. If it was better advertised and promoted, there would be a waiting list and people beating a path to his door. Nonetheless, he is making a living from a few cows of a breed that was written off 50 years ago because it didn’t perform as the intensifying industrial dairies required. Jonathan’s championing of the breed is a heroic success and a rebuke to all those farmers, agricultural colleges and agri-businessmen whose perpetual cry is that farmers must ‘get big or get out’.

  It had been known for centuries that if you wanted a pretty wife with an unscarred face, you should marry a milkmaid. It had also been known that transferring a small amount of material from a smallpox sore to a scratch on the skin of another person would often give them immunity to the disease. This was called variolation, from variola, the Latin name for smallpox. But the procedure was dangerous because some recipients got a full-blown case of smallpox and died. Smallpox was a terrible worldwide scourge. It is hard for anyone brought up in the last half-century – a time when we have come to believe that illness and even death are preventable – to imagine living with a disease that affected roughly 60 per cent of the population and killed about 20 per cent of those who caught it. And those who survived carried disfiguring pockmarks for the rest of their lives.

  But that was the way it was until Dr Edward Jenner (1749–1823), a surgeon living in Berkeley, and a few others – notably a Dorset farmer, Benjamin Jesty – showed that being infected by cowpox, which was much less dangerous, gave immunity to smallpox. Jesty experimented on his wife and children, something that was considered scandalous by his neighbours. They said he was inhuman, and mooed and threw things at him when they saw him in the street. People feared that introducing an animal disease into the human body would cause them to have bovine characteristics and grow horns or other appendages. Even though Jesty was proved right when his two older sons didn’t catch smallpox after being exposed to it, it took some time for popular opinion to accept it.

  James Gillray ridiculed the popular fears in a cartoon of 1802, The Cow-Pock or the Wonderful Effects of the New Inoculation, in which he showed people being rather brutally vaccinated with ‘Vaccine-Pock hot from ye cow’ and then growing various parts of cows from their bodies. In the background hangs a picture of the Golden Calf, implying that the vaccinators were in danger of worshipping their own creation rather than accepting nature as they had been given it.

  On 14 May 1796, a Gloucester cow called Blossom, belonging to a Mr Dean of Berkeley, earned her place in medical history. Blossom had infected Sarah Nelmes, her milkmaid, with cowpox, and Jenner was sure that transferring pus from her blisters into a scratch on each arm of eight-year-old James Phipps, son of his gardener, would protect him from smallpox. Jenner came up with the name Variolae vaccinae, literally ‘smallpox of the cow’, to describe cowpox, and the procedure became known as vaccination. Phipps developed a fever, which soon passed, but had no other symptoms. Some time later, Jenner tried twice to infect him with smallpox by introducing infectious material into his system, but to no effect. He had tried the same thing with 16 other patients, so he was pretty confident it would work with Master Phipps. His vaccinations were described in his first paper to the Royal Society, in which he showed that all the people he treated gained immunity to smallpox. He went on to try it with a further 23 patients, all of whom acquired immunity. The medical establishment, as ever, was slow to accept his research and the Royal Society did not publish his initial paper, deliberating at length over his findings before they eventually accepted them.

  In 1840, the British government banned variolation – using smallpox to induce immunity – and instead provided free-of-charge nationwide vaccination using cowpox. The various nineteenth-century vaccination acts from 1840 onwards consolidated the state’s determination to eradicate the disease. It became compulsory for parents to have their infant children vaccinated before the age of three months. There was an undercurrent of opposition by a minority of parents who resented being forced by the authorities to submit their children to what was believed to be a potentially dangerous procedure. Safer vaccines, and more stringent compulsion, such as fines and imprisonment, reduced the number of refuseniks, but there was still some opposition, which bubbled away and boiled up from time to time – and still does today.

  Jenner’s discovery soon spread around Europe and the rest of the world. Even though France was at war with England, Napoleon had his troops vaccinated; in return, at Jenner’s request, he released English prisoners of war, remarking that he could not refuse anything to one of the greatest benefactors of mankind. In 1802, Parliament granted Jenner £10,000, and another £20,000 in 1807, after the Royal College of Physicians confirmed the widespread benefits of vaccination. The gift was worth £2.2m in today’s money.

  Blossom was not forgotten. She had her (rather amateurish) portrait painted by Jenner’s great-nephew, and when she died, Jenner had her hide tanned and hung in his coach house. Reminiscent of Jeremy Bentham’s stuffed skeleton in his box at University College, London, the hide now hangs on the wall of the St George’s medical school library in Tooting, south London. Holy relics of the Jenner/Blossom cult continued in circulation long after the famous cow’s death. At one time there were five of her horns in existence, and in 1896, hairs from her tail were put up for auction. Hardly surprising that a cult should have arisen over the eradication of the scourge of smallpox, which to most people in
the world was nothing less than a miracle.

  1 Robert Bakewell (1725–95), the famous agriculturalist and livestock breeder who farmed at Dishley Grange in Leicestershire and was at the forefront of the eighteenth-century revolution in selective breeding to create new types of domestic livestock for meat production. He was by no means the only innovator, but he was arguably the most skilful and influential and a masterly self-publicist; his incestuous breeding methods inspired, for good or ill, a host of imitators and have had a profound and lasting effect on livestock breeding.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Shorthorn

  George Bates was devoted heart and soul to farming. His highest ideal of happiness was the Horatian picture of a man owning and occupying a hundred acres, undisturbed by anything passing in the world outside. For those who regarded their estates merely as game preserves or props to their self-importance, and took no active interest in their cultivation, he entertained the bitterest contempt.

  Cadwallader Bates, Thomas Bates and the Kirklevington Shorthorns (1897)

  THE FARM-GATE WHOLESALE milk price in March 2018 in the UK was 30p a litre – little more than it had been eight years earlier. The cost of producing that litre depends on many things, but on average, with high-yielding cows, it is about 33p. Milk sells for between 70p and 90p a litre in retail shops – two to three times the price the farmer gets. So how do farmers milking cows carry on when they are losing so much money on every litre they produce, unless they turn their farm into a mega-dairy and hugely increase production?

  The twenty-first of March 2017 was the first day of a two-day dispersal sale of the Brafell herd of Dairy Shorthorns at Penrith Farmers’ and Kidd’s auction mart. The cows to be sold were that half of the herd that had calved by the day of the sale. The remainder were to be sold on 23 May, when they too would have calved. The owner, John Teasdale, was 74 and had had two strokes; after the second, he had to be carried out of the milking parlour. His son was not interested in the slavery of milking cows, perhaps unwilling to make the sacrifice that had consumed his father, who had given his life, heart and soul to his herd of pedigree Shorthorns. For it is still upon people like John Teasdale that we depend to put milk, butter and cheese on our tables.

  John’s father, Thomas Teasdale, started the herd in the early 1930s at Uldale, near Caldbeck in Cumbria, high up on the northern edge of the Lake District, with glorious views of the Solway Firth to the north-west. John carried it on, latterly from a slightly better farm on the other side of the Solway at Kirkbean, near Dumfries. There is a glorious stubborn individualism in keeping Dairy Shorthorns in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. They are not the heaviest milkers, although they are better than they once were, and their milk is not as high in butterfat as some pure dairy breeds such as the Jersey. There is a similar prejudice against the farmers who keep them as there is against ‘hobby farmers’. They are not commercial, they’re a bit romantic; not real farmers at the cutting edge of modernity. In progressive quarters Shorthorns are sneered at as a recherché interest; any farmer doing the job properly wouldn’t mess with the breed; instead he would have black-and-white Holsteins, real dairy cows that give proper quantities of milk. That’s the thinking of the industrial dairy farmers. But it is not so certain that aggressively commercial farmers are right to dismiss a breed so deeply rooted in the history of British farming; that has been bred to make the best use of grass, especially on a hard farm.

  A ‘hard farm’ means everything to a farmer, but it is not easy to explain. It can be anything from relatively infertile low-lying land where stock does not do as well as in other places, to fertile but high-lying soils where spring comes later and autumn closes in sooner. It can be a farm where the land is exposed to storms, or where snow tends to lie longer than elsewhere. It can be a farm facing north and east, rather than south and west, or on the wrong side of a valley, lying in shadow on winter days, white with frost where the sun cannot penetrate. It can be a farm with steep fields that are hard to cultivate. There can be myriad reasons why a farm is hard, but the essential thing to understand is that in more sensible times, when the value of a piece of land was related to what it would produce for human benefit, hard farms were cheaper than other farms and could give a skilful, ambitious young farmer a start in life.

  Before the EU’s single farm payment, inheritance tax benefits and a global asset price bubble drove the price of an acre of farmland into the realms of fantasy, a hard farm gave Thomas Teasdale a start in farming because he and his cows knew how to be resilient and thrifty, and if the farm couldn’t produce it then they couldn’t have it.

  Every piece of land has a natural capacity to produce an annual increase derived from photosynthesis. Fluctuations in weather, human skill and effort can reduce or enhance the production; spending capital can have some effect. But many enthusiastic people have found to their cost that there is no limit to the amount of money that a hundred acres of English farmland will absorb. It can be drained, hedged, fenced, watered, fertilized and ploughed. All manner of fancy buildings can be erected on it, and expensive breeds of livestock can be bought to give more milk or breed more or better offspring.

  But when it comes down to it, the only test of success is the amount of money left at the end of the year. And that depends, in almost every case, on the money the farmer doesn’t spend. With dairy cows, the secret is to balance the milk they produce against the cost of getting it. That is where the Shorthorn justifies her existence. A good cow will produce about 5,000 litres in a 300-day lactation, against a Holstein, which gives on average about 7,000 litres. But the difference is that Shorthorn cows like Thomas Teasdale’s will do that on home-grown grass and forage, with about 3 lb of cow cake a day, whereas the Holstein will need much more lavish feeding. In addition, a Dairy Shorthorn will last longer than a Holstein; she has smaller calves, so giving birth takes less out of her; and she is a better converter of roughage into milk, flesh and fat, so that at the end of her life her carcase will have a value, whereas the rangier Holstein will be little more than a bag of bones.

  The Dairy Shorthorn went out of fashion when cake and fertilizer were cheap and milk was worth more in the wholesale liquid market irrespective of whether it was fit for something better than pasteurizing and homogenizing. Most herds simply went black and white. Many of the Shorthorn herds that remained had to consider other ways of surviving than selling to the MMB. The Teasdales got a small premium from a creamery to make industrial Cheddar cheese.

  These Shorthorn herds contained good cows, well bred, with long pedigrees, but they were not worth much. At the Teasdales’ dispersal sale, the auctioneer made the point several times, trying to squeeze the last £20 out of buyers, that he was selling dairy cows for the same money 30 years ago: ‘Come on, lads, get your hands in your pockets. These cows have come off a hard farm and can only improve. They just need a change of scene.’ Pedigree livestock are still sold in guineas – one pound and one shilling (5p). The pound used to go to the seller and the shilling to the auctioneer for his commission. Now it is no more than an amusing anachronism, because the auctioneer wants more than 5 per cent commission.

  It is usual not to milk dairy cows the night before a sale, so the buyers can see what their bags (udders) look like full of milk. At the fall of the hammer the auctioneer will usually offer the buyer the service of relieving the cow’s discomfort by milking her before the journey to her new home. At Penrith, the auctioneer asked each buyer how much milk he wanted ‘tekken off her’. The answer depended on how far the cow had to travel and how mean the buyer was. With some it was ‘just a gallon’, while others wanted her ‘milking out’. One delightful roan cow, Brafell Lady 7th, went for 1,020 guineas; as she left the ring, the auctioneer shouted, ‘How much do you want tekken off her?’ and the buyer, quick as a flash, shouted back, ‘About five hundred quid!’

  Most of the Teasdales’ herd was killed in the general slaughter during the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic, but the b
loodlines were saved because some of their heifers were wintering away from the farm. They gave John Teasdale the nucleus of a resurrected herd. The average daily milk yield of all their cows is about 26 litres (6 gallons), with some giving over 30 litres (6½ gallons). The herd calves in the spring (spread over late January, February, March and early April) to coincide with the growth of spring grass. The yield therefore peaks during the three months when the grass is at its most nutritious (late April, May, June and early July) and then naturally declines into autumn. The cows will mostly be dry by Christmas, in preparation for their two months’ recuperation before the next calves are born and the cycle starts all over again.

  The Shorthorn has occupied more attention and had more written about it than any other breed of cattle. Most of the highest prices paid for pedigree animals have been for Shorthorns, and the first bull to fetch 1,000 guineas was Comet, a Shorthorn sold by the Colling brothers in 1810. The Shorthorn has the oldest herd book, Coates’s Herd Book, begun in 1822, and the oldest breed society, founded in 1872. Between the middle of the nineteenth century and the 1950s, Shorthorns were the most numerous breed of cattle in Britain, and are still the most widely distributed breed in the world. In the first cattle census, in 1908, 4.5 million of Britain’s 7 million cattle were Shorthorns. And in the remarkable story of nineteenth-century pedigree cattle breeding, the Shorthorn is the principal character.

  So where did this remarkable breed come from? For a partial answer, we have to look back three or four centuries into the east of England, Lincolnshire specifically, where a superior strain of milk cow first came to notice. One view is that the type emerged from the melange of localized varieties that had grown into regional types during the thousand years from the Roman recession to the fifteenth century. Another opinion is that during this long period, foreign stock was brought in to improve the native cattle, as was certainly known to be the case with horses. But there is no clear evidence as to the origin of what was described in various sources as the best English dairy cattle that could be found.