Pedigree livestock breeding induces intense rivalry between breeders, who, by definition, are individualists with strong opinions about the attributes of their breed and the rules that ought to govern their pedigree. Fierce disagreements often arise over arcane points of principle that would appear trivial to an outsider. To criticise a man’s sheep can be felt as keenly as if you were criticising his wife or children, and in such a small world, where everybody knows everybody else, slights are seldom forgotten. One of these differences arose almost at the beginning, when the Wensleydale breed achieved Flock Book status in 1890. ‘Flock Book status’ means that it was recognised as a pure breed and therefore registration in the breed’s Flock Book (its register) would be accepted as proof of the lineage of the animals there recorded and that they satisfied the breed standards as laid down by the Society.
The early breeders who tried to form the Wensleydale Longwool Sheep Breeders’ Association fell out over the question of whether any ram used before 1889 (the year before the Flock Book began) was entitled to have his pedigree registered. The older, established breeders could prove the purity of their rams for upwards of twenty years and refused to accept that they could not be registered. They therefore seceded from the Association and formed the Wensleydale Blue-faced Sheep-breeders’ Association which ran in parallel with the WLSBA for thirty years until a rapprochement in 1920 ended the feud. This arguably cost the breed the advantage over its great rivals the Border and Bluefaced Leicesters and created much lasting bitterness amongst its breeders.
Although the feud might have given the Border Leicester an advantage in the wider sheep-breeding world, it did little to slow the Wensleydale’s growing local hegemony over its progenitor the Teeswater, which was eventually reduced to a rump of a few breeding females. To the inexpert eye this eclipse might be surprising because there is little apparent difference between the two breeds and they both do a similar job. But a closer look will show that the Wensleydale is bigger and bluer, grows more wool and carries itself with an impressive hauteur. Teeswaters’ ringlets do not cover their eyes and head as thickly as the Wensleydale’s. It is claimed that a covering of wool over the head gives protection from flies and sun, but it is hard to see anything in the claim because most other breeds survive perfectly well without a mug of wool on their forehead. Comparing the two breeds it is difficult to understand why the minor differences between them should matter so much. Especially why the two breeds, so closely related, should breed true to their own type when the only genetic difference is that 200 years ago one Teeswater received an infusion of Dishley Leicester blood.
8
THE WELSH HALFBRED
IT IS FAIRLY EASY TO GET SHEEP TO BREED WITH ONE another. Rams of most breeds will mate with ewes of most others. Now and again a ram will refuse to mate with sheep from a different breed. I once bought a Bluefaced Leicester ram lamb and put him with a little mixed flock of Swaledales and Herdwicks. He served all the Swaledales but he wouldn’t go near the Herdwicks. He didn’t like the look of them, or maybe they didn’t smell right, but he wasn’t the slightest bit interested; even when the ewes made it pretty obvious what they wanted, it made no difference. He just didn’t see Herdwick ewes as marriage material. I even saw him butt one out of the way so he could mount a Swaledale. But this kind of fastidious behaviour apart, sheep being sheep, most rams will breed with most ewes, given the opportunity, and produce lambs of some sort, because all sheep come from the same genetic stock.
But it is a different matter altogether to create proper hybrids. Maybe my Bluefaced Leicester ram was wiser than I thought and knew there was little point in wasting his energy impregnating Herdwicks, when he could do it with Swaledales, who were just as keen to bear his offspring and continue his line. What point was there in coupling with a Herdwick, whose progeny would be pedestrian and disappointing, when he could create Mules and be triumphantly proud of his issue.
When hybridisation works, it produces very pleasing results, sometimes from the most unlikely pairings. And of course if it produces horrors it is always possible to do a Bakewell and eat your mistakes. The supreme example of a hybrid that works is that ‘Queen of Sheep’, the Scotch Halfbred. This combination of a Border Leicester and a Cheviot is the benchmark, the template, against which all other hybrids must be measured. At one time it had no rival as a ewe for crossing with meat-producing rams such as a Suffolk or Texel. But gradually over the last few decades it has found its centuries-old dominance challenged by such upstart hybrids as the Mule, with its socially ambitious Bluefaced Leicester sire. There has also been another pretender to the crown which appeared a few decades ago; for a while it seemed as if it might succeed in its challenge, but in recent decades it has slipped back.
The Welsh Half bred on its mother’s side is from the mountains of Wales, and its father is a Border Leicester from the Borders of Scotland. There are 7 million sheep in Wales adapted to every nuance of climate, terrain and their breeders’ fancy. About 2 million of those are Welsh Mountains, which by 1958 were so numerous that the breed society divided itself into two sections: the Pedigree Section and the Hill Flock Section. The latter concerns itself with the Hardy Welsh Mountain, and it is from this breed that the Welsh Half bred was created nearly sixty years ago.
Until 1955 the Welsh Mountain was outside the magic circle of hill breeds, each of which had its own complementary Longwool crossing sire. Welsh draft ewes were usually sold in the autumn into a market where the only buyers were either butchers, looking for meat to make mutton pies and curry, or farmers seeking a cheap ewe for crossing directly with a Down ram. The lambs from this cross would be good enough for the meat market, even if on the small side, but they would seldom be of the highest quality, and once the ewe had given a crop of lambs, she would usually be sent for slaughter at the same time as her lambs, at the end of their first summer in the lowlands.
There had been some haphazard and disorganised crossing of Welsh draft ewes with Border Leicester rams, but there were no recognised standards for the resultant cross-bred lambs, and no guarantee of the quality of sheep for sale. Those buyers who might have been interested were given little confidence in the quality of the animals and, as a result, Welsh hill farmers received some of the poorest prices for their draft ewes of any of the British hill breeds. This was not helped by their being small, half-starved and straight off their wild mountain grazings. But their appearance did not reflect the true hybrid-breeding potential of these sheep, or recognise that they were still young when they were sold, having bred only two or three lambs. They were destined for the abattoir almost before they had had a chance to mature.
It was not until three ambitious young farmers from North Wales saw an opportunity and determined to realise its potential that the Welsh Mountain ewe’s fortunes changed dramatically. They could see that the first cross with a Border Leicester could produce a breeding animal that would rival the great ‘Queen of Sheep’ itself. Properly promoted, they were confident that the Welsh Half bred would find a ready market. In 1955 the three ‘young Turks’, as Nick Archdale calls himself, the late Francis Morris and the late Gordon Wilyman, formed the Welsh Half bred Sheep Association with the aim of breeding a hybrid that would produce high-quality butchers’ lambs and lift the fortunes of the Welsh Mountain draft ewe from its post-war nadir.
Maybe it was because both Nick Archdale and Gordon Wilyman were outsiders and had not been brought up to stock farming, that they could see the opportunities. They were certainly hungry for the considerable success they both achieved as farmers and judges of livestock. Nick Archdale says the credit for the success of the Welsh Half bred should go to Gordon Wilyman, who gave the Association ‘the stamp of integrity’. But Nick plays down his own efforts that went into developing the Welsh Half bred. Right from the start the Association set, and enforced, very high standards for the sheep sold under its auspices. Every seller had to be a member of the Association, although the membership fee was set at a nominal o
ne-off £5 so that nobody was excluded on account of slender means. No sheep could be called a Welsh Half bred unless it had been sold at one of the Association’s annual Welsh regional sales. All ewe lambs had to conform to a uniform standard of appearance and the seller had to warrant that they had been sired by registered pedigree Border Leicester rams. The Association appointed inspectors who examined every single sheep in the pens before each sale, and had the right to reject any animal they judged defective without giving any reason. And every sheep was warranted by the Association to be the age the seller said it was and free from specified parasites, diseases and defects.
The officers of the Association took their duties very seriously and were determined that buyers could buy breeding sheep with complete confidence. Commercial buyers of hybrids have no knowledge of, or control over, the breeding of the ewes offered for sale. In most cases they will only find out their qualities after they have had their first crop of lambs, when it will be too late. This is one of the reasons why the Welsh Half bred Association’s guarantee was so effective in giving buyers the confidence to trust to the honesty of the breeders of the parent breeds.
The morning after one sale, Nick Archdale received a complaint from a buyer near Beccles, close to the Suffolk coast, about the state of the feet of some ewe lambs he had bought the day before. So he and Francis Morris left immediately for Beccles, driving across England, in pouring rain, long before motorways. When they arrived and turned up the sheep, they found a few with mild foot rot, which they treated with the usual gentian violet antiseptic spray and then drove back to North Wales, all in the day. That attention to detail ensured the Association’s success in creating a huge following for the Welsh Half bred, almost overnight, and almost from nothing. At the height of its popularity up to 50,000 breeding ewe lambs annually went through the sale-rings in one of the Association’s five autumn sales at Ruthin, Builth Wells and Welshpool.
This threw a financial life-line to Welsh hill farmers who had hitherto struggled to make much of a living from their flocks; the better prices encouraged them to breed a stronger, better Welsh ewe, no longer seen as fit only for making lamb curry and mutton pies. Within a few years the Welsh Half bred became the Welsh hybrid and quickly established a powerful national following. It had the strengths that come from hybridisation: its mother’s hardy constitution, thriftiness, and milking and mothering instincts; and from its Border Leicester father, size, prolificacy, meaty frame, and good teeth and feet. Of course, it had the usual demerit of hybrids that they are a cul-de-sac, the end of the line. Farmers who keep them cannot breed their own replacements, and once hybrid ewes reach the end of their productive lives, they must be replaced with more hybrids.
The Welsh Half bred is smaller than the Scotch version, but it is cheaper to keep, lives easier off the land, and will produce two lambs of similar size to their mother, each year, with minimal extra feeding. It has the robust look of the barrel-shaped Leicester, with white legs, white face and erect ears, black muzzle and a good fleece. In short, it is a great grassland breeding sheep.
Nick Archdale is a lean, tall and energetic man of eighty-nine. His forebears emigrated to Co. Fermanagh from Shropshire in 1605. He describes himself as ‘a complete hybrid’: Northern Irish father, English mother who couldn’t have been more English, he was born in Rhodesia, married a Welsh wife and lives in Wales. Little wonder that he appreciated the value of hybrid vigour and he should have built his farming success on it.
The Archdale sheep enterprise at their farm at Pen Bedw is a text-book example of the sheep pyramid on one farm. Right at the top is a small flock of 100 pure-bred, high-quality, pedigree Welsh Mountain ewes to breed rams as sires for the main hill flock. The best twenty ram lambs are kept each year to breed with the main hill flock of 1,000 Welsh Mountain ewes. This flock is descended from a ram lamb born to a ewe that survived the awful winter of 1947. She lived for weeks under the snow, eating heather (and even her own wool). The flock grazes the 1,800-foot hill Moel Famau (pronounced ‘moyle vammer’), from whose summit, on a clear day, can be seen much of North Wales, the Isle of Man, up to the Cumbrian fells and across the Lancashire plain as far as Blackpool Tower. In 1810 the ‘Grateful Farmers of North Wales’ subscribed towards the building of an ambitious stone tower in the form of an Egyptian obelisk on the summit to commemorate the jubilee of ‘Farmer’ George III. The structure was never completed because the subscribers ran out of money, and then much of what had been built blew down in a great storm in 1862.
The pure-bred mountain flock forms the genetic core of the sheep enterprise upon which all the rest of the farm’s flocks depend. The best 300 ewe lambs are retained in the flock each year to replace the same number of five-year-old ewes that are drafted out at the other end. This keeps the numbers steady at about 1,000 breeding ewes. All the surplus lambs are sold: the ewe lambs for breeding and the wether lambs for meat.
But instead of his selling the 300 older ewes off the farm (as most hill farmers would have to), there is enough better land at a lower level at Pen Bedw to keep a flock of about 900 draft Welsh Mountain ewes, in three age groups, all of which are crossed with Border Leicester rams to produce Welsh Halfbreds. This is the first crossing in the pyramid. Each year, the best 400 or so Half bred ewe lambs join the main flock of 1,800 Welsh Half breds which are kept on the best land on the farm. The rest of the lambs of both sexes are sold. All these Halfbreds are crossed with meat-producing rams, usually Texels, which are found to perform best at Pen Bedw. This is the second cross in the pyramid. There is no fixed retirement age for these Half breds. They will be kept in the flock as long as their feet and teeth are good.
This is how the sheep pyramid works on one farm. At each successive level, as the ewes mature and move downhill, not only does the lambing percentage increase, but the lambs produced become bigger and meatier. The four flocks at Pen Bedw contain a total of about 4,500 breeding ewes, which produce about 6,000 lambs a year. These are made up of about 1,200 pure-bred Welsh Mountain hill lambs: 1,250 lambs from the draft Welsh ewes crossed with the Border Leicester and about 3,000 Texel cross lambs from the Welsh Half breds; all of these are destined for the table as high-quality Welsh lamb.
Pen Bedw is unusual because few farms are large enough or, more to the point, have such a range of suitable land from high hill to lowland to keep a flock at each level of the pyramid. For many years they bought in Welsh Mountain draft ewes, and were the biggest sellers of Welsh Half breds in Britain. But the trade has recently shrunk from the great phenomenon it once was. This is partly due to the Welsh Half bred losing out to the Welsh Mule – a cross between the Hardy Welsh Mountain and the Bluefaced Leicester (that Bluefaced Leicester again!), which is believed to be more prolific, but the lambs are not as tough because they are born with very little wool, and in a cold wet spring more die after lambing than those sired by the hardier Border Leicester.
The Bluefaced Leicester has also tended to eclipse the Border Leicester because the latter’s breeders have, as Nick Archdale said, ‘concentrated too much on the front end rather than on the back end, where the money is’. Border Leicester breeders seem to have yielded to the temptation to produce stylish sheep with an aristocratic head, but as Bakewell might have put it, nobody eats a sheep’s head. For this reason the Archdales have introduced a switch of the meaty Texel into their Border Leicester rams to try to counteract the front-end dominance of the Leicester; this coincidentally was the chief demerit of Bakewell’s original Dishley Leicester and seems to have a tendency to reappear in its descendants if unchecked. This infusion precludes them from selling Half bred ewe lambs at the official Welsh Half bred sales, because they cannot be warranted as having pure Border Leicester fathers.
The Welsh Half bred’s great strength was its teeth and feet. These, combined with the quality of the udder, are of paramount importance to the longevity of sheep and particularly important in hybrids that are expected to work hard. A ewe has to be able to provide copious
amounts of milk, in a concentrated period of time, to feed two lambs to be as big as their mother in four to five months. It is therefore crucial that she ‘keeps a good hold of her bag’, as they say in ovine circles. For if her udder begins to sag there is a risk of her treading on her teats, or picking up an infection that can cause mastitis, or other injury. Also her lambs will find it harder to suckle from a ewe whose udders hang low and the ewe is likely to be less agile and energetic if she has to carry around a pendulous udder.
There have been many other efforts over the years, especially in Scotland, to create hybrids, some more successful than others. The Scottish Greyface is a Border Leicester ram on a Blackface ewe that has a strong following. The Shetland-Cheviot is a brave attempt to put some value into the white Shetland draft ewe by crossing her with a North Country Cheviot ram. And going rather against the trend of subordinating the wool to the carcase, ‘breeding experts’ at Scottish Fine Wool Producers bred the Lomond Half bred. This involved the creation of a new breed from two types of Merino, which they called the Lomond and that became the crossing ram for white Shetland or Cheviot draft ewes. The Half bred ewes clip a high-quality fleece and as lambs they can be shorn twice in their first year, as can their cross-bred lambs before slaughter.
This hybrid has not met with universal approval. It is not as good in the carcase as the other popular hybrids and the extra wool hardly makes up for that unless the price is to rise considerably. Its creators seem to have forgotten, if they ever knew it, Bakewell’s famous dictum that you can’t have fine wool and a superior carcase. Also, as the nineteenth-century breeders discovered, after a couple of generations the Merino will ruin the carcase of any sheep it breeds with. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the Lomond Half bred does not seem to have had quite the success its progenitors hoped for.
Counting Sheep Page 14