The Horse in the Furrow

by George Ewart Evans

  Arthur Pratt was a friend of Martin Long, the agent of Kenneth M. Clarke of Sudbourne Hall, and assisted him in choosing the first team of six Suffolk geldings which competed at Olympia in 1909. About this time big commercial firms were entering these competitions for publicity reasons more than anything else: in this particular year Armour’s of Chicago sent over a fine team of Percherons to compete. But the Suffolks took the prize. Afterwards they were sold to Bostock and Wombwell, the menagerie proprietors, and toured the country advertising the menagerie in whatever town it appeared. The combined weight of the team was over six tons, and was made up as follows:

  Tons Cwts Qrs Hands

  Smiler 1 2 0 17. 0

  Proctor 1 1 0 17. 1

  Prince 1 0 0 17. 1

  Dragon 19 2 17. 1

  Wallace 19 2 16. 3

  Boxer 18 3 16. 3½

  A leading newspaper of the time described them as ‘the best team of draught horses ever seen’; and a short time after they had been sold to Bostock and Wombwell one of the directors of the firm complained humorously to Martin Long: ‘That team of horses you sold us is causing a bit of trouble: they’re holding more of the public’s interest than the lions and the tigers.’

  At this period also—especially in the two years, 1912 and 1913, a great number of Suffolk stallions were exported, chiefly to the United States, Canada, Austria and Russia. In 1912 Arthur Pratt sold a stallion to the Czar of Russia for the purpose of breeding army horses: he was so pleased with the horse’s strain that he sent the breeder a gold tiepin, inlaid with six stones, as a mark of his appreciation. The pin—now held by Newton Pratt, Arthur’s son—is kept in a case bearing the name of the jeweller who supplied it: Fic Boucheron Pont Des Marechaux, Moscou—Maison à Paris, 26 Place Vendôme.

  Another method the Society adopted to keep up the quality of the Suffolk horse and to help small breeders was the Breeding Scheme, established in 1897. Under this scheme the Society supplied a limited number of small farmers with a mare costing not more than sixty guineas. The farmer agreed to pay not less than a quarter of the price of the mare at the time of the sale; and, in return for her use, four per cent interest on the balance of the purchase money which was paid by the Society. The mare was served at each season, free of charge, by one of the Society’s nominated stallions. The farmer reared the foal and delivered it on a day appointed by the Society; and at the sale he received the sum of £16 10s. for it. If at this sale the foal realised more than twenty guineas the farmer was to share the surplus with the Society; and all monies were placed to his credit in the Society’s books. The Mares Scheme continued successfully until 1951 when the last Society mare was sold. This year was in many respects ‘the farewell year’ of the draught horse on many Suffolk farms; for by this time the post-war surge in tractor production had swept most of the horse plough-teams from the land.

  The latest method the Society has evolved for encouraging breeding has grown out of the new situation caused by the great drop in the number of working horses on the farms. When the horses went from the land the older horsemen soon followed: many of these horsemen had remained on the farm long after retiring age owing to the scarcity of labour during the war. These older men usually had sole charge of the horses that were left, and few of the younger hands were trained in horse-management. Therefore those farmers who continued to breed horses soon found that few skilled men were left to break their colts in, and they ceased to breed for this reason.

  To get over this difficulty the Society decided to establish a breaking-in centre for colts. They found an experienced farmer who undertook to keep Suffolk fillies and geldings on his farm and break them to all gears before returning them to their owners. The colts are sent to the farmer—Sidney Buck of Combs, near Stowmarket—at varying ages, though as he said: ‘Thirty months old is the best age for breaking a colt.’ When they reach Potkiln Farm the colts have already been gentled to lead—trained to wear a halter or a headstall and to allow themselves to be led. A horse-gentler is the old Suffolk term for a man who breaks in colts, and this term is more in keeping with Sidney Buck’s methods and his philosophy: ‘You don’t break a horse. No horse is born bad: he is made bad. If you treat a horse right he will have a lovely mouth and will give no trouble.’ William Spalding, a horse-leader who sometimes helps him, says the same: ‘The lighter the hands the better. You should be able to hold ’em with a thread—hold ’em with your little finger. You don’t pull at a horse, you guide it. It’s the same with any kind of horse, light or heavy. What a young horse needs is a man with light hands—very light hands and plenty of confidence.’

  William Spalding, while illustrating the process of gentling, showed a special way of tying the halter—with a knot under the horse’s chin, instead of the usual place at the side, making it impossible for the horse to work the knot loose. The device was one he copied from the gypsies: and a halter tied in this way is known as a chapped halter.

  The introduction of the colt to the bridle and bit is critical: this step is the crucial one in the horse’s whole career. If a hard-handed ‘breaker’ gets hold of a colt during this stage the horse’s mouth quickly becomes desensitised and undesirable response-patterns are formed, and he will be difficult to handle all his life. The bridle (dutfin in the dialect) has a special wooden bit fitted with keys. These keys—loose pieces of iron attached to the centre of the bit—give the colt something to champ upon, thus producing the necessary lathered mouth. The flow of saliva, or lather, following the champing, minimises the friction of the bit against the sides of the mouth. The bridle is kept on for three days. Then the collar and the plough-traces are placed on the horse. The traces are tied up to the harness and the colt is thus made conscious of them against his sides, exactly as he would be when drawing a plough or a harrow. Wearing this trace-harness he is left to stand in the stall all day. Then he is fitted with the full cart harness or fill-gear and is left to walk about the yard for two or three days to get used to it.

  The next step is to harness the colt to a log of wood and to let him drag it in order to get the feel or ‘pull’ of a load. On the first day out—the first working day on the farm—the colt is harnessed in every gear he is likely to use: ‘This is important because a colt will always remember what has happened on his first day; and if possible you must give him on this day everything he has to do during his life.’ He is also harnessed alongside an older, more stolid horse who will steady him and hold him back if he plunges too precipitately forward. After they are harnessed for the first time, the colts are washed down with salt water to prevent galling—the breaking of the tender skin by the unaccustomed friction of the harness.

  Sidney Buck’s overall procedure is this: after the colts have been broken to all gears—usually by the end of their first week on the farm—he works them for a week. In the third week he eases off; and then works them again steadily during the fourth week, by which time they are, as a rule, ready to be handed over to their owners. The scheme is well patronised and markedly successful, the Society contributing a quarter of the cost of training each colt approved and sent to the farm.

  In the days when the horse was the chief power unit on the land colts were broken in on each farm in a way very similar to the above, which is in the main the traditional Suffolk method. But an account of colt-rearing and training on the farm is included here because of the additional detail gathered from horsemen who worked during the time of the full ‘horse regime’. The account is chiefly Arthur Chaplin’s:

  ‘On the farm where I worked most of my life there were five or six colts foaled every year. The head horseman got £1 extra allowance for every foal. This was for the extra work: taking care of the mare, sitting up with her the night she foaled and assisting with the delivery if necessary—for getting the foal into this country, as they used to say. (The first time I heard that expression was when an old ’un boasted to me: “I brought many a foal into this country.”) You got the £1 at Michaelmas when the foal was
weaned, and you’d be seeing to it up to that time, of course. A foal is born at the fore-part of the year, though it mayn’t come till April. But whenever it is born it’s counted as one year old on the following January; and a horse’s birthday, for keeping account on his age, is always in January.’

  Some foals are, in fact, born in January, but there is always a certain amount of risk if a foal is timed to arrive very early in the year. For if he is born before midnight on December 31st the foal is automatically a yearling as soon as the year ends—and that may be a matter only of days or even of minutes. At least one instance is known of a Suffolk mare foaling a few minutes before midnight on the last day of the year. When the foal was registered a few days later, it was accounted a year old; and the owner had to pay the fee for the registration of a yearling.

  William Groom’s experience with young, day-old foals will supplement the above: ‘I’ve had many a hard struggle with a foal on its first day. The trouble was in getting it to suck. It wouldn’t take the milk. It were too bitter. But it had to have it. It were the principle: the beestings or the colostrum, I believe they call it. It cleaned out the foal’s stomach ready for the milk. But the little owd foal had no time for it at all.’ It is interesting to note that modern bio-chemical research has shown that the beest or beestings has a very high content of vitamin A.

  ‘We used to start breaking the colt when it was very young. We put the halter on it, the younger the better. We gentled it to lead—trained it to walk along gently and turn and turn about. At the next stage, between two and three years old, we put the harness on the colt and let it stand in the stall and walk about the yard to get used to it. When the colt was ready we took it out and placed it on the plough, alongside an experienced horse. The colt worked half-days only at the start. After it got used to the ploughing we put it in the shafts of a tumbril or a wagon; and when it was broken to all gears we reckoned it was anybody’s horse; that meant anybody on the farm could take him out ploughing or doing any job that was wanted. If we had a really good horse we kept him out of the shafts as long as we could, so anybody couldn’t take him out and mess him about just as he wanted. We got an extra allowance of ten shillings for breaking in a colt.’

  To end with the subject of this section: The Suffolk Horse Society is still vigorous (although its membership has necessarily fallen in recent years) and the Suffolk horse classes at various shows are keenly contested. The breed is still prominent at ‘The Royal’ as it was during the early years of the Royal Agricultural Society’s meetings, starting a hundred and twenty years ago. But it was in 1934 that the Suffolk probably reached the high point of its prominence in the shows.

  In this year the Royal Show was held at Ipswich. The number of entries in the Suffolk horse section was 265. This was the largest section of any breed of horse, cattle, sheep or pigs in the Show; and the entry was double that of any other breed of heavy horse. As a climax, the whole entry of Suffolks paraded together: they had the Grand Ring to themselves—the only breed of heavy horse ever to be accorded this honour. The whole week of the Show (July 3rd–7th, 1934) was one of brilliant sunshine; and the crowds saw the Punch at his best. For in the sunlight the seven shades of chestnut found in the Suffolks come alive; and those who were present at this big parade have not forgotten the sight: the long neat lines of horses with their grooms—the strength of geldings, the solid grace of mares and the compact majesty of stallions—all spread over the ring in a warmth of colour that brought autumn to the green sward of high summer.

  15

  The Blacksmith

  The smith was a key man under the old farm-horse economy; and the smithy in addition to being an essential and regular place of call was also a kind of exchange for horse and farming news in the district. But in order to bring back the atmosphere of a smithy of this period as well as to record something of its organisation, the experiences of two Suffolk blacksmiths have been written down—one who spent most of his working life as a smith at a time when there were ‘horses only’ on the land; the other, a younger man, who is still a blacksmith today.

  Clifford Race (1898–1958) was born at Stonham Aspal and apprenticed to a blacksmith at Creeting. ‘He was the strongest man I ever knew but he went blind through the strain of smithing. He couldn’t see you if you were standing right in front of him, but he carried on at the anvil and used to feel the iron he was working.’ Clifford Race volunteered for the army during the First World War and served as a farrier. When he came out he worked for some years at a stud-farm at Henley (Suffolk); then he went back to smithing and worked for many years at Needham Market, a large village near Ipswich.

  ‘Nine of us worked at Day’s the blacksmith’s: two of us did nothing all day but shoeing. Most of the farms round here sent their horses to us, and there was plenty of work in the village: Quinton’s, the millers, had ten heavy horses and two light ones for half-ton carts; and Sage, a jobbing-master at The Rampant Horse, kept about six horses for use in broughams and so on.

  ‘The day started at six in the morning and went on till six in the evening—even until seven at one time. The guv’nor, the master-smith, were an old man over eighty. He were a remarkable man in his way: he went down a well to clean it out on the day he died. I believe he were eighty-six. But in his later years he didn’t come into the smithy until after breakfast. So the first man in the smithy in the morning had to pick up a hammer and strike the anvil three times—just to let the old man know we were on the job. He couldn’t go off to sleep again unless he heard the anvil ring.

  ‘The nine of us were put out to jobs like this: two were on the shoeing—two more were brought in if there was a rush; the guv’nor would be making mill-bills—a tool for trimming a millstone; two were on farm-work, sharpening the tines of harrows, mending ploughs and so on; the last four were normally on outside jobs, on pumps for wells—outside work of all kinds.

  ‘I was always on the shoeing job; but until seven o’clock each morning, until the horses started to come in, three of us would be shoe-making: two strikers and a smith. We took two old shoes; heated them and hammered them together, the strikers striking alternately; the smith holding the shoe on the anvil and using the small hammer himself. New iron wouldn’t do for shoes at that time o’day. It would be too soft. The more you hammer iron the tougher it gets; so the old shoes welded and hammered together lasted much longer. They don’t do that today: it would take too long. The shoes are all machine-made today. If it were a wet day the horses started to come in sharp after 7 o’clock. For on wet days the farmer said: “There’s nothing for ’em to do here. Take ’em off to the blacksmith’s straight away.” Then we’d be working on the horses all day until about 4 o’clock when they usually stopped coming. Then it was back to double-hammer shoe-making until knocking-off time.

  ‘During the twelve-hour day the two of us aimed to do thirty-six shoes, that is nine horses. Two of us averaged four shoes an hour. The town horses came in every three weeks or a month for reshoeing. Country horses—horses that worked chiefly on the land—came in once in three months, on the average. The town horses were nearly always leg-weary, and harder to shoe. They’d lie on you as you lifted the leg: a town horse seemed double the weight of a country horse just because it were leg-weary. Another thing we noticed was this: as they were leg-weary they wore their shoes out more quickly; these town horses often did up to forty mile on the road during the day, and they got into the habit of sliding and dragging their feet. This just burned their shoes up.

  ‘But we had one old country horse that was a bit of a nuisance—a big mare. She were a fine-looking animal, and she’d always give us trouble—but she couldn’t help it, poor owd gel. She were jink-backed. You couldn’t back her. She had something the matter with her spine. She used to stagger, and if you didn’t watch out she’d come down on you and crush you while you were a-shoeing her. When I tell you she weighed over a ton, you can see why we were a bit narvous. We used to mark her up special on the calendar; a
nd we took care to make a right good job of her: we took an extra lot of trouble with her shoes so we could keep her away as long as we could. We’d often make the owd gel go for twenty-four weeks without coming to us. She were a beautiful bay mare with feet like butcher’s blocks. You couldn’t go wrong when you were actually a-shoeing her. She had so much hoof you could bang the nails in anywhere you liked, and they’d all be right. The only thing you had to watch out was that she didn’t start to stagger and put one of them feet down on you a bit sharp, or fell on you as she were a-swaying about with her jink-back.

  ‘Jink-back1 is something like slipped-disc, I should say. You can tell a horse in this condition without actually trying to back him. You just want to put your hand on him and he’ll start to quiver—afraid you’re going to back him. It’s often caused by some accident.’

  ‘There was plenty doing in the smithy when it was only horses on the farms. Sometimes there’d be eight or nine people standing about there swopping news—market news and just ordinary gossip. You hardly had room enough to do your job, but you daren’t tell ’em to get out o’ the way; or else they’d say they’d as much right to be there as you had! You had to go a-shoeing the horse as best you could. At election time it were well nigh impossible.