Until the early years of the nineteenth century if a farmer wanted to sell his sheep (or any other produce or livestock) he would take them to his nearest market town on market day and try to strike a bargain with any buyer who approached him. There were also bigger sales on fair days, but the same method applied: buyers and sellers haggled until they either made a bargain or the seller would have to take his produce home and try again next week. This was how things worked in England for many centuries.
Then, in 1849, Robinson Mitchell, a man from Cocker-mouth, in Cumberland, who had started a weekly furniture sale on the Fairfield, declared that he was ‘tired of seeing the higgling and piggling which it required in order to make a five-pound bargain’, and began to take open bids from buyers. It is claimed that this is where the modern auction system began. But this is an ambitious boast, because the Ancient Greeks sold things by auction, particularly maidens. Auctions being as old as time, Mitchell’s claim that he was the inventor of the system may be going a little far, but it is true that he was one of the first to revive the system for the sale of livestock and one of the first in the country to erect a purpose-built auction mart in 1865. This was built close to the new railway station that so radically transformed the movement of livestock and killed off the ancient droving trade. Animals could be sold in the morning and transported across to the other side of the country by nightfall. This was hardly, if at all, slower than road transport today. Very soon similar auction marts grew up close to railway stations in market towns and remoter places all over the country.
It is now hard to imagine sheep farming without auction marts. They have many benefits to both seller and buyer, with the most important being that they are the quickest way to turn goods into money because the contract is made, and the price becomes due, on the fall of the hammer. They are also one of the purest markets by which buyers and sellers are brought together and a price is fixed immediately. Few people would be rash enough to dishonour an auction debt; it would be social suicide in such a small world as farming and auctioneering, where reputation is almost everything. No auctioneer would ever again take a bid from a defaulter.
Auction marts have always been more than just a place to buy and sell. They’re where farmers go for their weekly get-together, and a respite from the endless farming routine, where they can catch up with the news, and have a whisky or two. Some use the auction as a kind of bank, keeping a running account, and when they sell livestock they will leave the money ‘lying on’ and when they buy the auction will deduct the price from their account. Auctions will lend money to favoured people. One dealer I did business with borrowed the money from an auction mart to buy fifty acres of land and paid it back over a few years.
When I worked for Harry Hardisty, the Herdwick breeder (we shall meet in Chapter 10), we used to go to the auction most weeks in winter to sell fat sheep. Before the start of every sale the auctioneer would get somebody to draw a ticket out of a hat, like a raffle, to decide which pen to start with and then he would hand over to the mart men, who were responsible for ensuring an orderly flow of animals through the ring. They would not hold up proceedings to wait for the seller if he wasn’t present and they were reluctant to skip a pen because it would confuse the order of sale and if they did and the sheep made a bad price, they tended to get the blame. The sheep to be sold were penned down one side of the mart, and those that had gone through the ring were penned down the other side. The men worked their way up the aisles, driving a pen at a time into the ring until all the pens on one side were empty and all the pens on the other side were full. If sheep didn’t make what the seller thought they were worth, he would ‘pass them out’ and take them home. Once Harry was so exasperated with the bidding for a pen of his fat sheep that he pulled off his cap, beat the air with it and, slowly shaking his head, shouted up at the auctioneer on his rostrum, ‘Let them out! I’ll take the buggers home and eat them myself!’
Harry wasn’t much of a showman. He was too shy to cope with being the centre of attention. Occasionally this cost him a better price. Sometimes you could wring another pound or two out of the buyers by putting on a little show or making some effort to make your sheep stand out from the hundreds of others. Some sellers were naturals at it. One trick was to sort the sheep by size and colour of wool into uniform batches of ten or twenty, which always made them look more attractive. Another was for the seller to stand in the middle of the ring, where the floor is slightly higher, and make the sheep parade round and round him like a circus ringmaster with a troupe of ponies. The knack was to wade into the middle of the flock and exploit the tension between the animals’ fear of the faces arrayed around the outside of the ring and their desire to flock together for safety. The seller would stand amongst them and tap them round with his shepherd’s stick. Once the first couple of sheep moved, the rest would follow, trotting nose to tail, round and round the ring, parading themselves before the buyers.
This kind of showmanship was often best seen at the autumn sales of draft mountain ewes in country auction marts at remote places, like Reeth, or Middleton-in-Teesdale in the high Pennines, or the Herdwick sales at Troutbeck or Broughton-in-Furness. The auctioneer would announce the next seller, the gate would open, and a lean, weather-beaten hill shepherd (often accompanied by his dog) would stride into the ring, in his nailed shepherd’s boots and waterproof leggings, long coat flapping behind him, smoking pipe clamped between his teeth, and take up position in the middle of the ring. The first batch would be driven into the ring and he would make them parade around him, encouraging them by tapping their steaming backs with his long stick. These sheep were often straight off their mountain grazings, dipped and marked and sorted into regular batches. If there was a large ‘show’ it always excited interest and in the hands of an expert it was an impressive sight.
Certain cosmetic tricks could lift the bidding. Sheep that ought to have had white faces and legs would have them washed with Fairy Liquid and their wool shaped with shears – particularly round the head and neck and rear end – to try to give the impression that under the fleece lay a promising carcase. It was hard to know whether it had much effect on the price. Many of the buyers were hard-headed men who were not easily taken in. Harry thought that titivating sheep for sale had a similar effect to a woman wearing makeup: ‘You know she’s wearing it but you don’t know what she would look like without it.’ Sometimes fresh life could be breathed into flagging bidding by holding up (or sticking on the back of a bullock) some folding money – twenty pounds would usually do the trick – as extra ‘luck money’. This is the cash that sweetens the deal after the sale. The seller will seek out the buyer, and offer his hand with a folded banknote in the palm, to seal the bargain, with a handshake, for ‘luck’.
9
THE SUFFOLK
It profiteth the lord to have discreet shepherds, watchful and kindly, so that the sheep be not tormented by their wrath, but crop their pasture in peace and joyfulness; for it is a token of the shepherd’s kindness if the sheep be not scattered abroad but browse around him in company. Let him provide himself with a good barkable dog and lie nightly with his sheep.
From a thirteenth-century treatise on estate management, quoted in Eileen Power, The Wool Trade in English Medieval History (1941), lecture II
THE HYBRID EWE IS ONLY THE FIRST CROSS IN THE sheep pyramid. To fulfi l her purpose of breeding high-quality butchers’ lambs she has to be crossed with one of what are broadly called the Down breeds, which all have the same purpose of siring offspring with meaty car-cases. This is the second and ‘terminal’ cross in the pyramid and is where we get most of our lambs destined for the modern meat market. This group of sheep includes many breeds that have never seen a piece of English downland, but they all have in common that they are either directly or indirectly descended from the Southdown, which was the first modern Down breed, created in Sussex largely by John Ellman (1753–1832) over 200 years ago.
In 1780, a decade after Bakewe
ll’s work with the New Leicester, John Ellman of Glynde in Sussex began breeding sheep to satisfy the growing demand from a metropolis becoming hungry for meat. Ellman is credited with turning the native shortwoolled heath breed of the South Downs and the other chalk hills of Kent, Sussex and Hampshire, into a meat-sheep for the London market. And in so doing he created a sheep that not only became the premier breed of the English downlands, but also had a crucial influence in the formation of all the English Down breeds which are the basis of sheep farming across the New World. For, apart from being the ancestor of the Down breeds, the Southdown was, and remains, particularly in the Antipodes, an important breed in its own right. In this it was more successful than the New Leicester, which, once it had done its work, rapidly sank into obscurity. The vital difference between the two was that the Southdown was an improver of its own heath-type relatives, which became the Down breeds, whereas the New Leicester’s value was as a crossing sheep with ewes of entirely different ancestry.
The old type of Southdown that had ranged the uplands in the south of England for centuries when Ellman began his breeding improvements possessed a number of admirable qualities that few other English breeds of the time could match: their short wool was better than any of the other Shortwools, apart from the Ryeland; they were slender-boned with well-flavoured flesh; and importantly their hindquarters, where the most valuable cuts are, were heavier and stood higher than their forequarters; also they not only matured earlier than all the other unimproved British breeds, but they were very frugal users of pasture and the wethers could be ready for the butcher at eighteen months.
By the time Ellman began his work Bakewell’s changes to domestic livestock breeding had already inspired a great sea-change in the type of sheep the breeders were creating. It has been said by various modern commentators that before Bakewell breeders thought the only way to make their livestock more productive was to feed them better. It is said that the practice was to send their best animals to market and retain the poorest for breeding and that they did not understand the harm it did to their flocks. But it is hard to believe breeders did not understand that breeding from their poorest animals would cause their stock to deteriorate. It seems more likely that this assertion has been misinterpreted and that breeders sent their ‘best’, i.e. their fattest, animals to market and kept their ‘poorest’, i.e. thinnest, to breed from. It has to be conceded that in most cases there was no batching according to age, animals of all ages ran together, and when an individual was ready for slaughter it would be drawn out from the flock and taken to market, rather as they still do on North Ronaldsay.
Ellman was only one of the several improvers of the Southdown working at the time, but his gift for self-promotion, ably supported by his friend and supporter, Arthur Young, the first Secretary of the Board of Agriculture, ensured that he got most of the credit for its improvement, while Young claimed the credit for being the first to import Southdowns into Norfolk. Together with certain aristocratic enthusiasts, notably Thomas Coke of Holkham and the Duke of Bedford at Woburn, they made the Southdown the most fashionable breed of the day. It was favoured by ‘gentlemen farming their own estates’, not least because its mutton was reckoned to be of far finer quality than the New Leicester, which was widely considered fit only for the labouring classes. By the middle of the nineteenth century the flesh and wool of the Southdown fetched the highest price of all British breeds.
As with most of the early livestock improvers, Ellman was, if not quite secretive, at least opaque about his methods. He is said to have introduced into the old Southdown a cross of the now extinct dark-faced, polled Berkshire Nott, and, as is the inevitable result, sacrificed the fineness of the wool and sweetness of the meat in favour of size and earlier maturity. But the deterioration in the wool may also have been down to better feeding, rather than any genetic alteration. Ellman seems not to have followed Bakewell’s practice of in-and-in breeding and ruthless culling of animals that did not quite come up to scratch. Rather, he mated those of his ewes with undesirable qualities with rams he had selected to correct these defects.
There seems to have been some Roman ancestry in the old Southdown, with its polled head, white Roman nose and fine wool, but there is something else there as well, because early writers describe a breed with a dark, sometimes mottled face and long legs; it is also a Shortwool, not a Longwool of the type the Romans almost certainly imported. Also the French version of the Southdown has retained the dark face and long legs. Whatever its ancestry, Ellman’s improved Southdown was so popular by the end of the nineteenth century that there was not an English Down breed without an infusion of its blood; some, such as the Shropshire Down, received half their inheritance from the Southdown.
Ellman and his contemporaries’ work in Sussex inspired another renowned breeder, Jonas Webb of Babraham in Cambridgeshire, to create a flock whose influence on the breed was so pervasive that, on occasion, the Southdown was called the Cambridge Down. Great rivalry arose between the Babraham breeders and the original Sussex Southdown men: the latter declared that they ‘could get as good legs of mutton as Webb did but the Babraham shoulder was beyond them’. In turn, Webb’s success with his rams in the show-ring and the enthusiasm of the breed’s noble supporters spawned a surge of interest in the breed that led in the 1830s to the creation of a number of much-improved, and a few newly created, Down breeds that met with mixed success.
The motive for the multiplication of these breeds was simply the continual search for more and better mutton more quickly. With beef cattle this purpose could be achieved by improving three or four breeds that would readily accommodate themselves to local conditions; but with sheep, improving the carcase and accelerating the age of maturity were made more difficult because of the influence of the climate, the soil and even the natural flora of their home pastures. Their tendency to be products of their terrain made it hard for imported sheep to adapt themselves to a change of environment. This could often only be overcome by crossing improving rams with local ewes that had become acclimatised over centuries and thus preserve their female ancestors’ hereditary adaptation to the home ground. This is one of the reasons we have so many different breeds of sheep in Britain.
Gradually the new breed’s dependence on a particular locality could be diminished by domestic selection, which produced strains that would adapt themselves to widely different environments. For example, over the last century, the Suffolk has evolved types that are just as at home in the Scottish Borders, the hills of Northern Ireland and Wales, or the lush lowlands. The Texel has become similarly adaptable to most locales.
The most successful of the new improved Down sheep was the Hampshire Down, created by William Humphrey from Newbury, who was so impressed with the Southdowns at the first show of the Royal Agricultural Society in 1842 that he bought a son of Jonas Webb’s renowned ram Babraham to found his new breed. The Oxford Down was the largest and much in demand to breed heavyweight lambs from upland ewes. The Dorset Down was created from a cross between a polled Dorset, a Southdown and a Hampshire Down; and the Shropshire Down, from a cross between a Southdown and a local Midlands or Welsh border sheep, and for a century from about 1850 was so startlingly successful as a ‘colonial ranching’ sheep, and for breeding lambs for the meat trade, that by 1911 it was described as ‘the most ubiquitous sheep extant’ having been exported to every continent of the world. But it proved to be a shooting star, because by 1972 there were only ten registered flocks left.
The Down breed that is by far and away the most successful and has had the greatest influence on sheep farming across the world is the Suffolk, which, during the last century and a half, has been providing meat for the tables of millions of people across the world.
Until the end of the eighteenth century the indigenous sheep of East Anglia was a black-faced, horned, shortwoolled type, almost certainly of Saxon origin. It had been established for centuries on the heathlands of Norfolk, particularly on the Brecklands, the hung
ry sandy soils of the north-west of the county, to which it was particularly adapted. It was also naturalised in the east of England, where it bordered on the Longwools in the Fens and on the Wolds of Lincolnshire, and in Leicestershire, extending south into Cambridgeshire and Essex. It was lean, long-legged, tough and agile and well suited to ranging across the open heathlands of Norfolk and Suffolk, particularly renowned for its capacity to endure ‘hard-driving’. The ewes were the best of mothers, prolific and fiercely protective of their lambs. It is likely to have come from the same stock as all the other black-faced, horned breeds such as the Swaledale, the Scotch Blackface and the Lancashire variant of the black-faced type, the Lonk. Its fleece was particularly useful; the finest part from around the neck was said to be ‘equal to the best from Spain’ and its wool provided the raw material for the considerable Norfolk woollen manufacture that developed around Worstead, where the eponymous worsted cloth originated.
While large parts of Norfolk remained unenclosed, the Norfolk Horn was regarded, quite rightly, by many farmers as the only breed that could thrive on the dry heaths in summer and endure the fold–course in winter. Its main value was as a provider of fertility for the light soils of East Anglia under the traditional sheep and corn fold–course system, for without the manure and treading of these sheep the land would hardly have been worth cultivating. During the summer, the flocks grazed across the huge open heathland commons that formed the greater part of each parish, and then at Michaelmas (29 September) they were gathered up and brought onto the open arable fields, where they were folded for the winter to graze across the stubbles.
Counting Sheep Page 15