Counting Sheep

by Philip Walling

  Of the Dishley Leicester’s many other detractors, some were motivated by jealousy and ignorance, but there were others whose criticisms were valid so far as they went: its flesh was coarse and its stocky build sometimes made lambing difficult; it did tend to run too early to fat and was heavier in the front end than the rear – where the dearer cuts are found. But Bakewell replied to them all with his characteristic brio that ‘mutton anywhere was welcome to the poorer classes’, and that fat mutton found ‘a ready market amongst the manufacturing and laborious part of the community’. Because of all these deficiencies, as a pure breed in its own right, the Dishley Leicester proved disappointing.

  Another famous agricultural improver, the aristocratic Thomas Coke from Holkham, in Norfolk, began his own improvements by keeping Dishley Leicesters, and sold their mutton ‘at 5d the pound to poor people in Norwich’. But he would not eat ‘the insipid fat meat’ they produced. He preferred the sweet lean mutton of the ancient Norfolk breed from the Brecklands, notwithstanding his decades-long (eventually successful) campaign to eradicate Norfolks from his estate and from the county. Coke subsequently disavowed his Dishley Leicesters in favour of the improved Southdown created by yet another great eighteenth-century improver, John Ellman from Sussex.

  But the Dishley Leicester’s peerless value turned out to lie in its quality as an improving breed. This characteristic made it so popular that by the end of the eighteenth century it had spread throughout Europe and during the early part of the nineteenth its descendants played a crucial role in sheeping the New World. It was also found to possess the remarkable property of encouraging milk production and fecundity in its cross-bred daughters and of being able to breed with smaller ewes without causing them to have over-large lambs.

  Bakewell was a remarkable man in an age that made remarkable men. He was a self-confident, even cussed character, described by one who knew him well as ‘a tall broad-shouldered, stout man of brown-red complexion, clad in a loose brown top coat, scarlet waistcoat, leather breeches, and top boots’. Sir Richard Phillips, who made engravings of Bakewell’s sheep, knew him well and compared him with William Cobbett:

  In originality and in self-thinking on every subject I have never met with any approaching to him except in William Cobbett … in his opinions he was as bold and original as Cobbett. The vulgar farmers hated him, just as the small thinkers hate Cobbett … there was the same playfulness of manner, the same contempt of vulgar opinions and of authority in thinking, and the same deviation from common tracks both in conclusions and practice…

  He was a bachelor, who did everything by the light of reason and appeared to have no time for marriage, perhaps because he felt it might have distracted him from his great project. His household was presided over by his sister, who ran Dishley Grange as her domain, where she kept almost open house for all who turned up to learn from the great man during the three decades when he was at the height of his success. Such was his fame that Prince Grigory Potemkin sought his opinion on agricultural matters, and Catherine the Great sent seven or eight young Russian men to be his pupils, with a view to establishing an imperial farm; but the empress lost interest and the venture came to nothing. All his guests, irrespective of rank, whether the sons of Russian noblemen, or tenant farmers from Yorkshire, ate side by side at a long table in his kitchen. Bakewell habitually took his meals by himself at a small side-table and was such a creature of habit that he never allowed his guests to interfere with his strict daily routine. No matter who was staying, he always retired at eleven, ‘having knocked out his last pipe at 10.15’.

  It is astonishing what Bakewell achieved by instinct, coupled with powerful determination to follow it, against long-settled custom and initial hostility. He achieved rapid results by ignoring the almost unbreakable taboo against incest, practising ‘in-and-in breeding’, or ‘line breeding’ as it is called nowadays. His method was to choose animals with characteristics nearest to those he was looking for and then breed them together. It made no difference whether or not they were close relatives. If he considered it beneficial and necessary, he bred mother with son, father with daughter – and repeated the process, ruthlessly culling any defective offspring, until he had obtained the desired result.

  At the time it was an outrageous thing to mate his Long-horn cow ‘Old Comely’ with her son ‘Twopenny’ (so named because a farmer who saw the calf remarked that he wouldn’t give twopence for him). His crossings might well have produced some odd offspring, but if they did, there is no record of them and, in his careful, secretive way, he would have disposed of them and kept quiet about it. He never scrupled to cull any animal that didn’t come up to his exacting standards. There had long been a taboo on close-breeding of animals which followed the Bible and the Church’s injunction against the practice for humans. In George Culley’s Observations on Live Stock, 1786, he writes about the ‘common and prevailing idea … that [no ram] should be used in the same stock more than two years … otherwise the breed will be too near akin. Some have imbibed the prejudice so far as to think it irreligious.’

  It was not some who had imbibed the prejudice; it was an almost universal taboo considered contrary to the law of God and of nature. Bakewell dared to break it and in so doing achieved results that discomfited his rivals. Many really did think what he was doing was immoral, but some used their moral disapproval as a cloak for their jealousy of his success. He was convinced that the ends justified the means, which was not something early-eighteenth-century traditional society found easy to accept. But by the end of the century his methods had become so widely accepted that people had forgotten things had ever been any different, and probably forgotten the name of the man who had caused such a revolution.

  Charles Darwin credited Bakewell’s work as an influence on his theory of natural selection, saying in On the Origin of Species that the changes brought about by Bakewell’s selective breeding demonstrated ‘variation under domestication’. Darwin uses the example of two separate flocks of sheep (‘Mr Burgess’s and Mr Buckley’s’) which came from Bakewell’s original stock, and which over fifty years had become so different from one another that ‘they have the appearance of being quite different varieties’. Bakewell achieved his variation under domestication with the old Leicester sheep in less than half that time by his controversial in-and-in breeding.

  Bakewell was a Unitarian and it is tempting to connect his pragmatism with his dissenting. In an age in which formal religious practice still pervaded every aspect of national life, dissenting was an expression of rational rebellion against the zeitgeist. Dissenters still went to church or chapel, but they prided themselves on believing that they had thought out their own salvation, and there were few who applied this more assiduously than Bakewell.

  He was a great advocate of improving soil fertility by the percolation of flowing water, which he practised in his meadows and pastures. He went to the huge expense, on land of which he was merely the tenant, of digging between ten and twelve miles of canals to carry water from a stream on his land to fertilise his meadows. He also used these watercourses for transporting produce by boat around his farm, particularly floating turnips from where he grew them to a kind of holding place near the farmyard, where they arrived already washed and ready to feed to his housed livestock.

  Before it was accepted practice, he subdivided grazing fields into small enclosures by planting quick-thorn hedges so that he could rotate his grazing stock and make more efficient use of the grass and cause it to grow more vigorously. He made his farm roads concave rather than the traditional convex, so that water flowed across the surface of the road and into the middle, to clean and improve it. He grew large acreages of cabbages and turnips for winter feeding of his stock. He grew Dutch Willow and harvested it on a seven-year rotation, using the timber for making all manner of things around the farm, including tool handles, gates, fences, farm implements, and so on. When he was criticised for wasting land with the wide hedges dividing his grazing
fields, he replied characteristically (in a note quoted by Arthur Young, first Secretary of the Board of Agriculture, and his great supporter):

  If it be objected, that by this method, there is a waste of land, it is answered, that when the price of coals exceeds sixpence a hundred, the hedges make as much for the fuel as the land is worth for any other purpose.

  Perhaps his greatest innovation was the way he evaluated the effect of his rams on a wide range of different types of ewe by hiring them out (as he did with his bulls). When he first tried the practice it was ridiculed by many of his wiseacre farming neighbours and few were prepared to pay him much of a fee to use his rams. Some even thought he ought to be paying them. But, at that stage, the fee was of less importance to him than the opportunity to test out his rams for a season in flocks across England and observe the results. A large part of his success lay in his precise recording of the feeding and subsequent performance of his animals.

  He put great effort into riding around England during the summer, wherever his rams had been sent, evaluating their off-spring and carefully noting down the results. He covered huge distances on horseback at a time when roads were indifferently maintained and travelling off the turnpikes was an uncertain experience. Bakewell must have had a pretty detailed knowledge of the English countryside to undertake these excursions at a time before reliable maps. He often travelled alone and unannounced and he would simply observe over the hedge the flocks in which his rams had been at work. This behaviour was characterised by some of his critics as sneaking about and spying on his customers’ flocks.

  The first ram he let was for 16s for the season in 1760 and he drove it himself to the rendezvous at Leicester Fair. He let two others that year for 17s 6d each. The hiring fees remained modest for the next twenty years or so, until his perseverance overcame the opposition and by 1780 he could boast that he was letting rams for 10 guineas. Then by 1784 he was commonly getting 100 guineas for a ram for the breeding season (about four months). In 1786 he made more than 1,000 guineas from letting twenty rams, one of which was his favourite, ‘Twopounder’, so called because his shape was said to resemble the barrel of the two-pound cannon. Bakewell let him for a third of the season (probably about a month, or two seventeen-day cycles of ovulation) in the autumn of that year for 400 guineas. And in 1789 he made 3,000 guineas from hiring his rams, when a farm labourer’s wage for the half-year was 10 guineas. The Leicester Journal reported ‘a fact almost incredible’ that one of Bakewell’s rams had earned 1,200 guineas in hiring fees in one season.

  He had struggled as a young man against the prejudices of his elders and this kind of success justified the decades of perseverance. When the older farmers and graziers began to hire his improved rams and take his stock seriously, he knew he had made a breakthrough for, as he said, ‘when the old birds get into the trap the young ones will follow’. The hiring fees were paid by principal breeders to obtain a stock of rams which they in turn could hire out or sell to commercial farmers and graziers who were producing sheep for the meat trade. Bakewell himself hardly ever sold his rams, except to foreigners for export, because he wanted to keep the breeding within his control, believing it would become diluted and spoiled if it was to fall into hands less skilful than his. He was also shrewd enough not to sell his fat sheep in the livestock markets because he suspected that the butchers would not kill them, but sell them for breeding. So he had them killed at home and sold their meat.

  He kept a ‘control’ sheep in each flock – an animal not of his breeding – that he treated in exactly the same way as his own stock, so that he could compare its performance with his own sheep and thus demonstrate their superiority to his visitors. He also took in farmers’ ewes to be served by the rams he had kept at home for his own use. He used ‘teaser rams’, a practice that he appears to have thought up. These are ‘aproned rams of small value’ which ran with the flock to detect the ewes that were in heat. The method was to tie a large cloth, or ‘apron’, around the ram’s body in such a position that when he mounted a ewe the cloth prevented penetration. The ewe would then be caught and brought into a small enclosure to be served by the hired ram. This method conserved the stock ram’s energy because he was not continually running around trying to detect receptive ewes and it allowed the best rams to serve up to 140 ewes in a season. Bakewell charged between 10 and 60 guineas the score (twenty) for this service. That is between 50 and 300 guineas per ram per season – and these were not his best rams, because most of those would be away on hire.

  Bakewell’s skill as a showman also contributed to his fame and success, nowhere better exemplified than by the way he ran his annual ram hirings at Dishley at the end of July or the beginning of August. The expectant hirers were assembled in the great barn, which Bakewell had had specially built as a multi-purpose building, two centuries in advance of its time. The rams were brought in singly through one door, paraded round on a stage until all those present had satisfied their curiosity, and then taken out through another door. Once a ram had been hired Bakewell refused to show him again because he said it was human nature to want what one couldn’t have, and might cause the hirers to lose interest in the other rams for hire. He also exhibited what he considered to be the worst animals first and progressed to the best. His reason for doing this was, he said, that if he had exhibited the best first ‘their great superiority would have made the others [seem] much worse than they really are’.

  William Marshall records in 1790 in his survey of the Rural Economy of the Midland Counties (vol. I, p. 426) how Bakewell conducted the business of hiring his rams. He invited offers from the assembled buyers, which he either accepted or rejected as he saw fit. Once a price had been agreed there was no writing or legal agreement – everything was trusted to the honour of the parties – and the fee was not to be paid until the ram had had the opportunity to impregnate the agreed number of ewes. About the beginning of September, Bakewell consigned the rams to their hirers, many in places at some distance from Dishley, in carriages ‘hung on springs’, to ensure they arrived at their destination in the best possible condition. Then, after the ram had done his job, the hirer was expected to return him safely. If a ram died while away on hire, for whatever reason, Bakewell bore the loss. ‘The whole system manifested a wonderful degree of confidence and mutual good faith and contributed in an essential degree to the diffusion of the new breed,’ wrote Marshall.

  Another of Bakewell’s ingenious ideas was the ‘Dishley Society’ or his ‘Ram Company’ as he called it, which he established in 1783. Bakewell was president until 1795, the year he died. The Society had two main objects: to maintain the purity of the new Dishley breed and to establish a monopoly of breeding rams amongst the members of the Society. If a member refused or neglected to obey the rules the subscription of 10 guineas became forfeit and large penalties were imposed for wilful breach – up to 200 guineas in one case (the equivalent of between £15,000 and £20,000 in current money), which gives a good idea of how seriously its members approached the business of the Society and how much money they must have been making from their sheep breeding.

  Some of the rules are: ‘no member shall let a Ram on Sundays’; ‘secrecy be kept by all members respecting the business of these meetings … and that any member quitting the Society keep secret upon his honor [sic] the transactions before he left it’; and that anyone leaving the room while a meeting was in progress without the permission of the Society ‘shall forfeit one shilling for every quarter of an hour he is absent’. The New Dishley Society formed in 1994 continues in Bakewell’s memory to promote his revolutionary legacy and encourage research into pioneering agricultural methods.

  The French aristocrat François de La Rochefoucauld, who toured England in 1785, paid a visit to Bakewell at Dishley when the great man was over sixty. He thought Bakewell to be ‘a man of genius’ who early in life had grasped the simple truth about a grazing animal, that the part the butcher sold for the best price was the back – the si
rloin and fillet – for roasting, which he said Bakewell described as ‘gentleman’s meat’. The middle parts were worth less and the lower part ‘only fit for the army’. De La Rochefoucauld found it hard to understand how Bakewell had created his improved livestock: ‘I don’t really understand it, but I believe it, as I believe Religion.’ In fact nobody but Bakewell (and his faithful shepherd) really knew how he had done it.

  Two years before Bakewell died, one of his great friends, a Mr Paget who was a member of the Dishley Society and a successful breeder of Dishley Leicesters, sold his entire stock of ewes by auction in November 1793. The 130 animals fetched £3,200, an average of £25 16s 11d. That is roughly equivalent, at today’s value of money, to about £20,000 for each breeding ewe. The dearest fifteen sheep averaged 52 guineas each – about £40,000. No prices for ewes in the modern sheep world even approach this.

  4

  THE SWALEDALE

  And he gave it for his opinion … that whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.

  Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, II: A Voyage to Brobdingnag

  UP IN THE HIGH PENNINES, FOR MOST OF THE YEAR, the sweeping flat-topped moorland is scourged by wind and rain and snow; but for a few short months during the summer, when the land bursts into life and curlews and lapwings wheel in the high skies, it becomes a magical landscape, heavy with summer’s increase, warm days extending into short, light nights. This is the spine of England that runs south from the Tyne gap, to Wharfedale on the borders of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and it is Swaledale country. Small farms shelter from the storm, their fields parcelled out around them, bounded by drystone walls and dotted with hundreds of flagstone-roofed fi eld barns. And beyond the fi elds, the open moor.