William Marshall described feeding six-year-old Hereford oxen for beef, and could not help ‘expressing some regret, on seeing animals, so singularly well adapted to the cultivation of the lands of these Kingdoms … proscribed and cut off in the fullness of their strength and usefulness’. He remarked on the carcase of an ox, ‘six years in the yoke’, of which the flesh appeared coarse, but he ‘had never eaten such high, fine, full-flavoured beef’. Arthur Young1 approved of a ‘lengthy period of work between maturity and the butcher’s knife’. The great Northamptonshire and Leicestershire graziers went regularly to the Shropshire fairs to buy six-year-old bullocks and spayed heifers ‘which had been drawing Salopian ploughs for three years’.
By 1846, when the first herd book was published, the perfected breed type as we know it today had been fixed. The clean white face and red coat colour had won out over the mottled faces and other coloured coats. It enjoyed great popularity with commercial graziers at home and ranchers in the New World. The home buyers went to the Hereford Michaelmas fair, which was ‘not exceeded by any show of beasts in good condition in the Kingdom’. H. H. Dixon described the occasion of the great fair: ‘On the third Tuesday and Wednesday of October the parade begins at Hereford station and extends right through the heart of the town’ so that ‘windows are barricaded against them and trapdoors burst in by them’.
Most of the home buyers were graziers from the northern and western Home Counties who sought stock to fatten for the Smithfield meat market. The exported animals stocked the prairies of North and South America and the beef ranges of Australia. The first Hereford went to America in 1817, but it was not until 60 years later that the breed began to be grazed in large numbers on the ranches of the Midwest. Its capacity to colour-mark all its progeny with a distinctive white face no matter what breed it was crossed with, ensured that it commanded a higher price than less readily recognisable breeds and crosses. It also nicked well with certain dairy breeds, the Ayrshire being probably the most successful, and also as a second cross with an Aberdeen Angus out of a dairy cow, as I happily discovered with my own herd.
The Hereford achieved early popularity because its improvers achieved the goals of all the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century breeders sooner than those of other breeds: to make the animal reach maturity early in its life and to redistribute the meat on the carcase from the front to the rear quarters. Maturity in a beef beast is described by Trow-Smith as ‘the stage at which the animal begins to add fat to the foundation of bone, offal and lean meat or muscle which it has previously built up, in that order’. In unaltered breeds the final fat tended to accumulate in uneven patches. The early improvers strove to breed cattle in which the development of fat and lean meat – muscle – was a simultaneous process so that the animal reached maturity – became well and evenly fleshed – at an earlier age. In doing this, they also bred animals whose flesh became ‘marbled’; that is, the meat was interlarded with fat rather than the fat being laid down separately from the muscle.
Redistribution of the flesh from front to back resulted in a square, blocky animal rather than a wedge-shaped one that had the balance of muscle at the front like a buffalo. The breeders aimed to change their cattle from animals adapted to the age-old dual purpose of drawing the plough and cart into ones that the urban market wanted, namely those whose carcase contained more of the valuable cuts of beef. The hindquarters of the improved cattle became deeper and well developed, the ribs well sprung and capacious, and the neck and legs shorter. In doing this, the back became shorter, but the process of reversing the wedge from back to front so that the hindquarters were the heavier part of the beast and re-lengthening the back had yet to be achieved.
There is another change that some of the breeders (perhaps unwittingly) made that has had to be reversed in the modern climate of grass-fed beef production. That is that some breeds became adapted to making use of the new feeding stuffs that were becoming available as the nineteenth century progressed. They were moving away from being pastoral animals, adapted to thriving on grazing, to being fed on concentrates, particularly oil cakes (the residue of certain manufactures, such as linseed cake) and brewers’ grains. For example, the Aberdeen Angus (although it was not the only breed) became adapted to artificial stall-feeding (inside feeding on concentrated feed), in effect serving the valuable purpose at the time of transforming the cheap residues of crops brought across the seas from foreign lands into manure for the arable fields of Britain. The Hereford, on the other hand, never lost its predominantly pastoral characteristics, which ensured that it retained its popularity in the grazing countries of the world. When the emphasis swung back towards pastoral beef-rearing, Aberdeen Angus breeders found they had lost ground to the Hereford and had a good deal of work to do to reemphasize the primary purpose of beef cattle: to make beef from grass.
Jason had done his job and got every one of my heifers in calf. But now that his wanderlust became irresistible and my heifers had grown into cows that would more easily give birth to bigger calves, I needed a bigger bull to breed more valuable beef cattle. I rather fancied a Devon, and that was where I looked next.
1 Arthur Young (1741–1820) was a prolific and influential eighteenth-century writer on agriculture. He wrote a series of valuable books describing his travels in England, France and Ireland. In 1784, he began the Annals of Agriculture, which continued for 45 volumes, attracting many prominent contributors, including George III, who wrote under the nom de plume ‘Ralph Robinson’. Young was the first secretary to the government’s Board of Agriculture, which involved him in the preparation of the comprehensive General View of Agriculture surveys of most of the counties of Britain. He was a hopeless farmer, but a superb chronicler of the state of rural life, farming and contemporary events at a crucial period in European history.
CHAPTER 11
Ruby Red Devons
THERE ARE SOME breeds that fit their landscape so perfectly that it’s impossible to imagine any other type growing from the soil of that place. Some, writes Youatt, are ‘beautiful in the highest degree’; there are others with an ‘unrivalled aptitude to fatten’ from grass and forage that can be grown on the farm, without expensive imported concentrated feed, and yet others in which fat and flesh combine throughout the muscles, marbling the meat and imparting the sweetest flavour. But there are few breeds that combine all these things. The cattle of north Devon, Ruby Reds, are just such a breed. They share the country with the South Devons. No other English county has two native breeds of cattle with such striking histories and each deserves a part of this chapter.
The red Devon has been common in the north of the county for so long that nobody can say there was ever a time without them. In Domesday, there is recorded such a remarkable concentration of animalia (this term does not include milk cows) in north-west Devon, centred around Barnstaple, that Trow-Smith is emboldened to speculate that it ‘may point to the beginning of the slow expansion of the red Devon breed, which seven centuries later emerges into certain history as centred upon this area’. There are so few references in the historical records to colour, size or type of cattle that it is tempting to believe that the ‘red’ bull brought into Tavistock Abbey in 1366 as a heriot from a tenant at East Troswell was an early Devon.
The Pilgrim Fathers took Devon ‘milch cows’ as well as Dutch animals to the New World, where it was found that the English cattle withstood hardship better than the more demanding Dutch beasts and were ‘much less trouble … If any care be requisite, it is only for the purpose of giving them occasionally a little hay.’ They didn’t give as much milk as the higher-maintenance Dutch cows, but, wrote a Dutch observer at the time, they were much cheaper to keep and ‘they fat and tallow well’. Nothing much has changed.
There is such a succession of references to a concentration of cattle in north-west Devon, in the breed’s heartlands, that it would be reasonable to interpret them as showing that the red Devon has an unbroken ancestry as ancient as any British bovine
stock. There is some evidence that in Elizabethan and later times they were smaller than they are today; for example, Trow-Smith mentions navy suppliers in Devon stipulating that the minimum weight for a fat ox should be 6 cwt. This he presumes (on no particular evidence) to have been live weight, which would be about half the weight of a modern mature red Devon beast. But it is hard to believe they could have been half the size they are today. The breed’s heartlands are in the thousand square miles of upland and valley country between the Bristol Channel and Tiverton and between Barnstaple and Taunton. They were triple-purpose cattle. Although never givers of copious amounts, their milk was of an unrivalled richness (5 per cent butterfat for making butter and clotted cream) and they were reputed to stay in milk longer than most other cattle. Although their primary purpose was traction, at the end of their working lives (about the age of five or six) they were fattened for beef.
Until well into the nineteenth century in the West Country, long after they had been superseded by horses in other parts of England, oxen did most of the farm work, particularly ploughing. They were usually yoked two by two in teams of four, very occasionally accompanied by two horses. The reason for continuing with oxen was that the light, nimble horses of Devon and Cornwall were bred for negotiating hillsides with pack and pannier, rather than for the pulling power needed for the large wooden ploughs of the region. The same oxen always worked together in a pair, and each ox had a name to which it answered. Each pair had names that began with the same letter; the nearer one (left-hand side) was of a single syllable, while the far one’s name had two or more syllables: such as Lark and Linnet or Belle and Beauty. The ox with the shorter name was closer to the ploughboy, and its shorter name was easier to say and hear, giving it a more immediate impact. Working collie dogs traditionally have short names for similar reasons.
Ploughmen and their boys commonly sang as they worked, to relieve the tedium of walking up and down the field all day, to put a spring in their step and also to communicate with the ox team, which responded to the human voice. West Country ploughmen’s singing was unique. The ploughboy leading the team, walking alongside with his long hazel rod, with which he encouraged the oxen in their work, sang, or rather chanted, ‘with unwearied lungs’, almost from morning to night in a pure counter-tenor, just as if he was singing plainchant or recitative. And from time to time, as he directed the team, the ploughman would add in his part with lower notes in perfect harmony. Chanting encouraged and animated the team, just as armies sang as they marched, or sailors sang sea shanties. On still days, the ploughboys of Devon could be heard singing a long way off, and once heard, the haunting, ethereal sound was never forgotten.
Come all you sweet charmers and give me choice,
There’s nothing to compare with a ploughboy’s voice.
To hear the little ploughboy singing so sweet
Makes the hills and the valleys around us to meet.
Chorus:
For it’s hark! the little ploughboy gets up in the morn.
Move along, jump along.
Here comes the ploughboy with Spark and Beauty, Berry,
Goodluck, Speedwell, Cherry,
And it’s move along.
We are the lads that can keep along the plough,
We are the lads that can keep along the plough.
The old types of oxen, particularly the Devon, had stamina coupled with docility. They did well off what the farm would produce, and increased in value as they grew to maturity. It was said that a working ox gained a shilling a day, whereas a horse declined by about the same amount until at the end of its working life it was ‘nothing but a hide and a bag of bones’. James Black of Morden in Surrey wrote in 1784 of his Devonshire ox team that the expense of an ox’s keep was half as much as a horse and that he was worth two shillings a stone after his labour, whereas the horse at the end was worth five shillings for his skin.
Devon ox teams had something more: they were nimble and quick on their feet, and very rarely needed to be shod. At harvest time it was not unusual to see a team trotting at six miles an hour taking the empty wagon back to the field for another load of sheaves. No other cattle could do that. William Marshall in the late eighteenth century described them as the best workers he had seen anywhere, for although rather small, they made up for it with ‘agility and stoutness of heart…’
A Mr Herbert, writing in the Farmers Magazine and quoted by Youatt in 1834, describes the Devon ox: ‘Nimble and free, outwalking many horses, healthy and hardy, and fattening even in a straw yard, good-tempered, will stand many a dead pull, fat in half the time of a Sussex, earlier to the yoke than steers of any other breed, lighter than the Sussex; but not so well-horned, thin fleshed, light along the tops of his ribs, a sparkling cutter, and lean well intermixed with fat.’ The cow is described as much smaller than the bull, which is still a feature of the breed, ‘very quiet, the playmate of the children, a sure breeder, a good milker, a quick fattener, fair grass-fed beef in three months’.
The breed was largely left alone by the eighteenth-century improvers because there was nothing much that could be improved. It was a mercy for the breed that Bakewell had nothing to do with it. He is reported as saying that the Devon could not be ‘improved by an alien cross’. If it had any defect, it was a tendency to be heavier and stronger in the forequarters than the more valuable hind parts as a result of its long association with the plough and farm work. But it was still an unrivalled grazing animal which found a ready market – too ready, because during the high prices of the Napoleonic Wars, many north Devon breeders were tempted to sell their best stock and breed from the worst. They adopted a ruinous short-sighted system that nearly did for their breed. ‘If a calf which otherwise would be reared,’ said Marshall, shows ‘symptoms of a fattening quality, it is “bussed”; suffered to run with the cow, ten or twelve months … and is then butchered … Those which are of a nature to get fat at two years old, are murdered! Those which will not, are kept to breed from!’
Youatt thinks they were tempted to do this because until the end of the eighteenth century the north Devon farmers did not understand how superior their cattle really were. And even when they became aware of their good fortune, they were often slow to keep the best of the breed, which they ‘retained almost in spite of themselves’. Thomas Coke of Holkham, the great Norfolk agricultural improver and self-publicist (later Earl of Leicester), early recognized the superior worth of the breed and by 1814 had 128 Devons on his own farms.
Despite its excellence, by the end of the eighteenth century, the breed’s future hung in the balance in its own heartlands. Every Devonshire market day saw more excellent animals that should have been kept for breeding sold to the grazier or the butcher. Then, just in time, in about 1794, Francis Quartly of Great Champson near Molland on the southern edge of Exmoor stepped onto the stage. Fortunately there were still a few farmers who had refused to deplete their herds by selling their best stock, and wherever he found them, Quartly outbid the butcher and bought them to add to his herd.
In old age, Quartly confided to the Devon squire Thomas Dyke Acland, that ‘perceiving that good animals were becoming scarce, [he] bought quietly all the good stock he could meet with and continued this over many years to improve his breed’.1 Without a doubt, Quartly’s skill and determination saved the Devon. The Quartly bull that stamped his character on the breed was Forester (1827), great-grandson of Quartly’s Prize (1819), which had the oldest recorded pedigree in the Devon herd book. By the middle of the nineteenth century, nine tenths of the Devon herds were directly descended from old Quartly stock.
Francis Quartly was the youngest of three sons of James Quartly, who died in 1793 and left to him his leasehold farm and the herd that he had bred since 1776. The Quartly family had bred superior draught oxen at Champson since at least 1703. An inventory from 1725 of the estate of Henry Quartly of Molland details his herd: 8 cows and calves, value £28; 4 oxen, value £22; 4 steers, value £10; 8 two-year-olds, va
lue £18; 6 yearlings, value £9.
Francis’s brother, the Reverend William Quartly, was also a devoted breeder of Devons at his nearby farm at West Molland until in 1816 his stock and farm were taken over by his brother Henry. The valuation at the time put 11 cows at £127 (just over £10 each). The oxen were worth the most, at £13 13s. each. Henry continued to breed superior Devons until he died in 1840, when his two sons James and John succeeded to their father’s and uncle’s herds and maintained the standards. By this time the crisis had passed and other breeders arose, notably the Davy family (one of whom, Colonel Davy, founded the Devon Herd Book). By the 1850s, the Devon was second only to the Shorthorn in numbers in England, although there were nearly ten times the number of Shorthorns (4.4 million) than Devons (450,000).
Great Champson is still at the heart of the Devon breed. It is part of the Molland estate, owned by the Throckmorton family, a wonderful example of a landscape shaped by centuries of pastoral husbandry. The essence of the farming, the shape of the fields and the way they are divided has changed little for at least a thousand years. The happy combination of the breeders’ skill and the effect of climate and terrain produces ‘cattle beautiful in the highest degree’. But more than beauty, the cattle that grow out of this landscape are wonderfully capable of making the best use of the poorest roughage, calving easily, finishing to maturity entirely from pasture, and producing beef of the highest quality.
Till the Cows Come Home Page 18