The Horse in the Furrow

by George Ewart Evans

  But the important thing as far as the later stabilisation of the breed is concerned is this: by 1880 Herman Biddell could write that the first family—that coming from Crisp’s Horse of Ufford,19 a descendant of the old breed of Suffolks—had succeeded in establishing itself over the other strains of imported blood; and it was from this stock that all, except a handful, of the stallions of that time were descended. The new blood had improved the old indigenous stock; but this, although admitting modification, was too tenacious to relinquish the mainstream through which the best characteristics of the old breed had come down. And by 1952 this process had gone further: the outside blood had been completely absorbed; and Raymond Keer, the present Secretary of the Suffolk Horse Society, could write that ‘every animal now in existence traces its descent in the direct male line to Crisp’s Horse of Ufford.’

  But what are the main characteristics of the Suffolk breed of horse? The first and obvious one is the clearly defined colour. The colour of the old breed was distinguished by the now obsolete term sorrel20—a name which still remains in many Suffolk inns. The colour today is chestnut; but there are seven shades of chestnut: the red; the golden; the lemon or yellow; the light, mealy chestnut; the dark; the dull-dark, and lastly the bright chesnut. The bright chestnut is considered the most characteristic colour and, all other things being equal, the one to be preferred.

  The Suffolk’s head is big with a broad forehead, and often with a star on it or a shim21 or blaze down the face; the neck deep in the collar and tapering to a graceful setting of the head; the shoulders long and muscular and thrown well back at the withers. The well rounded rib—the barrel chest that has helped to give the Suffolk the name of Punch—is a distinctive feature, as is the deep carcase. This last is one of the first essentials of a true Suffolk; for it was bred for use on the farm, and for use on the Suffolk farms in particular, where it was the custom—as we have already seen—for the horses to work a long day from 6.30 a.m. to 2.30 p.m. without nosebag or any break for rations. An ample bread-basket was thus indispensable to the Suffolk; and this characteristic—emphasised by selective breeding—is another example of the inspired fusion of breed, local custom and use that has gained East Anglian farmers such a deserved reputation as stock-raisers.

  The shapely outline of back loin and quarters is as noticeable as the deep carcase. ‘Feet, joints and legs—the legs should be straight with fair, sloping pasterns, big knees and long clean hocks on short cannon bones, free from coarse hair; the feet should have plenty of size with circular form protecting the frog; walk, smart and true; trot—well balanced all round with good action. If one were asked the question, what are the four chief characteristics of the Suffolk Horse? the answer would certainly be—colour, quality, compactness and hardy constitution.’22

  These, the present day characteristics of the Suffolk, began to merge in their main outline during the obscure but important formative period of the breed in the early part of the nineteenth century. Farmers at that time were stimulated by an atmosphere of experiment in agriculture; and Suffolk farmers in particular saw the results that had already been obtained in improving local breeds: and their enthusiasm, even though it appears to have been backed by nothing more than traditional, trial-and-error methods, did wonders. But as early as 1840, shortly after the Suffolk breed of horse came into the picture through his early successes at the Royal Shows, a local farmer pointed out that if the Suffolk was to continue to deserve the name they would have to compile an accurate registry of pedigrees. Had there been men with the resources and opportunity to follow Arthur Young’s advice earlier in the century, it is probable that the Suffolk would have attained an earlier perfection. For if the main responsibility of improving the breed had been concentrated in the hands of a few breeders who knew exactly what they were aiming at, without doubt a stud book would have been started at that time.

  It was only when these conditions had evolved, later in the century, and breeding was concentrated chiefly in the hands of three outstanding studs that there followed the real stimulus to set up an organised society to sponsor the making of a stud book. These studs were Cretingham Rookery (Nathaniel Barthropp); Butley Abbey (Thomas Catlin; and Thomas Crisp, after 1855); and Newbourn Hall (Samuel Wolton). Herman Biddell summed up the influence of this handful of breeders by saying about Catlin what he could have said, equally well, about the others: ‘But in Suffolk of late there has been a Bakewell abroad.’

  The Suffolk Stud-Book Association, later to become the Suffolk Horse Society, was founded in 1877; and the first volume of the stud book was published in 1880. But even at this date it is likely that the project would have fallen far short of the founders’ intentions had not a man like Herman Biddell been at hand with the energy and determination to carry it through. For, ideally, it was a job that should have been started at least thirty years before; and only a man of Herman Biddell’s temper would not have been daunted by the task of going back into the obscure period above mentioned and laboriously picking up and unravelling the many threads that had become tangled long before by time and death’s haphazard handling.

  1 Robert Reyce, The Breviary of Suffolk, 1618, John Murray, 1902, p. 42.

  2 32 Henry VII c. 13.

  3 Breviary of Suffolk, p. 27.

  4 See also W. E. Tate, ‘A Handlist of Suffolk Enclosure Acts and Awards‚’ Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology‚ Vol. XXV (1952), p. 225.

  5 F. H. Hollis, ‘The Horse in Agriculture,’ B.O.H., p. 174.

  6 A.F.C.H., p. 78.

  7 Sir John Cullum, History of Hawstead, 2nd edition, 1813, p. 256.

  8 A.F.C.H., p. 125.

  9 G.V.A.C.S., p. 217.

  10 H. Cecil Pawson, Robert Bakewell, Crosby Lockwood, 1957, p. 106.

  11 Ibid., p. 138.

  12 Ibid., p. 45.

  13 38 George 111 c, 41.

  14 p. 253.

  15 The Statute does not appear to have been amended until 1874. The Ipswich Journal 21st April comments on the Budget of that year: ‘The remission of the Horse Duties will assist the agricultural interest in so far as it will, undoubtedly, stimulate the demand for horses.’

  16 The number in the Stud Book.

  17 This spelling is the traditional rendering wherever the word is linked with the Suffolk horse.

  18 S.H.S.B., Vol. 1, p. 39.

  19 ‘From this animal are descended, with the exception of less than half-a-dozen, all the Suffolk horses now (1880) at stud.’ S.H.S.B., Vol. 1, p. 21.

  20 Sorrel was the name of the horse that tripped over a mole-hill and fatally threw William III.

  21 shim: a white mark, a dialect word from O.E. scima—brightness or splendour.

  22 Raymond Keer, ‘The Suffolk Horse,’ M & B Veterinary Review, Vol. 4, No. 2, November, 1952.

  12

  Herman Biddell and Volume One

  A friend of the Biddell’s at the end of the last century stated that the record of the family was of such a kind as to lead their contemporaries to look for great things of anyone bearing the name. There was ‘a strong intellectual and moral fibre’ running right through the Biddell’s; and Arthur Biddell’s sons certainly confirmed this judgment. Manfred, the eldest, was a very successful farmer and breeder of horses; he became the first treasurer of the Suffolk Stud-Book Association and has left a series of interesting and informative letters written to his friend Thomas Crisp of Chillesford Lodge, another Suffolk farmer and horse-breeder. George Arthur Biddell was an engineer who started his career with Ransome’s, as already stated; he became well-known all over England for his inventions not only in agriculture but in the wider field of civil engineering. William Biddell, the third son, became Member of Parliament for West Suffolk during the ’seventies; he was known as ‘The Tenant Farmers’ M.P.’ and did a great deal at Westminster towards forwarding their interests. But Herman was in many respects the most outstanding of the four brothers. He was a man of great strength and versatility of mind. He had all of the Bid
dell family’s strain of commonsense and practical application; was a rare judge of a horse and an authority on all aspects of farming. But in addition he was an artist of ‘no mean execution’ and an accomplished and ready writer with a blunt, sinewy style and the gift to coin, on occasion, a particularly memorable phrase. Also, in the words of a contemporary: ‘he was a speaker of such power of illustration and readiness one feels at times that he ought to quit all other callings and take himself to the platform.’

  All this seems the more remarkable when it is stated that the only formal education the four brothers received was that given at a little school at the nearby village of Grundisburgh. George Biddell, in later life, stated that they had obtained a good elementary grounding at the Grundisburgh school, but his one regret was that he had not been trained in the higher mathematics as this subject would have considerably eased his early efforts to make way in his profession.

  Herman followed his father and two of his brothers as a farmer; and this was his chief occupation throughout his life: farming was his true calling in spite of his many other pre-occupations. He first set up on his own when he was twenty-one years of age; and the opening entry of his first Day Books shows him marshalling his assets like a young soldier who was about to enter a stiff but not unexhilarating engagement. The A.B. referred to is undoubtedly his father; and it was from him that he had learned the practice of making a frank avowal, at least on paper, of his resources:

  October 1853: I this Michaelmas Take the Grundisburgh Farm of my Brother William and set off with a Capital of something like £1310 in business for myself. The money I have become possessed of has come in this way as near as I can remember:

  At this time the Money as described on opposite page (as above) is placed or invested something pretty nearly as follows:

  By 1860 he was married and living at Hill House, taking over the farm after his father’s death in that year. His interest in the Suffolk horse showed itself early in his career; and he could see, even as a young man, that the Suffolk would not continue the successes he had already won unless the more or less haphazard, or at best ‘intuitional’, methods of breeding were changed. A register of breeding was essential not only to consolidate the gains already made but to prevent deterioration and to fix the breed along the chosen lines as consciously and as scientifically as possible. Before Herman Biddell’s time two of the old breeders—Shawe and Barthropp—had advocated a stud book, and about 1850 Barthropp had actually started on one; later, however, he was compelled to lay the manuscript aside. Then in 1862 Herman Biddell, realising that many of the facts that would be basic to an accurate stud book had never been written down and would soon be lost irretrievably unless they were then taken from the men who knew them, called together at Hill House a meeting of the oldest and best informed leaders in Suffolk.

  A horse-leader is a groom who during the season (early spring) is responsible for leading a stallion to serve the mares in a chosen district. Herman Biddell knew it was from these grooms he was likely to get the most accurate record of the various horses that had been prominent in the county during the first fifty or sixty years of the century. He was not mistaken: ‘The torrents of fact which the party poured forth was a history in itself.’ The meetings at Hill House were repeated, and fresh history was garnered on every occasion; but it was fifteen years later before it could be written down in the manner that had been planned so long before.

  The delay would have discouraged a less determined man than Herman Biddell; but he was more than equal to the job of persuading his fellow farmers of the need for a register; and, moreover, of later carrying the difficult work through. A description of him at a later stage of his life was no doubt almost equally appropriate to this time: ‘He was a man of strong personality, stood six feet three inches high, weighed eighteen to twenty stones, a born fighter with a strong face surmounted by a thick crop of iron grey hair.’1 A story, recalled by Robert Sherwood, illustrates his temper: He had been, as he himself confessed, churchwarden at Playford for forty-four years—in sole command as it later turned out. But along came a new bishop and tactfully pointed out that according to church law there should be two churchwardens in any one parish. But Herman Biddell would have none of this:2 the churchwardenship was too narrow a deck on which to share the command with anyone; and as a special faculty was not forthcoming he immediately ceased to be churchwarden, content merely to equal his father’s record and not to surpass it.

  The founding of the Suffolk Stud Book Association in 1877 for the specific purpose of compiling a register was, as far as Herman Biddell was concerned, the end of a long campaign. It was also the beginning of a shorter one, but one that was infinitely more arduous; which was to take up most of his working and waking moments for the next three years until the initial work was completed and Volume One was published. For he was made editor, and he realised from the start that he was working under the greatest disability that could have hindered an editor in a task of this nature: ‘We commenced too late’, as he himself well knew, twenty or thirty years after the groundwork should have been completed. Yet he went into the job with good heart, and could write at the end of it: ‘In conclusion let me add, that it was in no blind ignorance of the magnitude of the undertaking that I accepted the responsibility of editing the Suffolk Stud-Book. The sacrifice it required at my hand was a call on almost the entire time of two years and a half; but I look back with something more than satisfaction at the days I devoted to the object we had in view. The work was ever a labour of love; it never became a burden, and as each sheet had been revised for the press—as each day brought my task nearer to its end, the regret would come—that there would soon be no more of its work to do. I would that another year’s labour at the Stud-Book was before me—one more year to have filled the blanks—one more year to have fetched up the lost threads in the tangled skein which had given me such pleasure to unravel.’3

  He met indifference and suspicion from many who could have made his task easier, but this did not deter him: he was sure he could salvage much and enshrine in Volume One a record of the patient efforts of breeders, both known and unknown, reaching back into the previous century. Volume One is a monument to his dogged persistence, and to his belief that he was not engaged on a work merely of the hour: the Suffolk, he believed, was an animal that would be not only a pride and use to the county but—as Arthur Young had stated many years before—an asset and an ornament to the nation.

  The sources of information at his disposal when he began his search were varied: advertisements of the horses by their owners—these were either printed on special cards or in the columns of newspapers; catalogues of sales and of Shows; oral information from breeders, owners, dealers and leaders. These last—some of the men Herman Biddell had gathered together at Playford—supplied him with the bulk of the information on which he built the first volume.

  An advertisement in the Ipswich Journal for Saturday, April 11th, 1801 will give an idea of the type of material in which he searched and will indicate how much checking and cross-checking would have to be done to identify the horse advertised. This particular horse is probably 1117 in the stud book:

  ‘To Cover This Season

  At William Spinke’s, Eyke

  A Bright Chestnut CART HORSE at 15s. 6d. each Mare. To pay the Man at the time of Covering. He is 16 hands 1 inch high, short leg’d and large boned. He will be at Alderton Swan on Tuesday, at Bealings Admiral’s Head on Wednesday mornings, from 9 to 11; at Woodbridge White Horse same day; and at home that night; at Saxmundham Bell on Thursdays; and Bramfield Queen’s Head on Fridays; at Framlingham Crown on Saturdays; at Parham-Hacheston Queen’s Head that night; and at home on Mondays. Such mares as were not stinted last season may be covered at 8s. 6d. each.’

  *

  The above helps to elucidate the phrase so often used in connection with a leader: ‘He travelled a horse in such-and-such a district,’ that is, he led the stallion round to the farms or to agreed p
oints in the area where the mares were brought to him. A very valuable stallion rarely travelled: he would be advertised as standing at stud and he rarely left his own farm except on his prize-winning tour of the shows. About this time another horse-breeder, who also figured in Volume One,4 advertised in the same paper; but the advertisement is not directly about a horse: