Counting Sheep Read online

  A staple, another English term in common use, is a lock of wool, and staple length determines how easy it is to spin into a yarn; wool with shorter staple lengths is used for woollen manufacture, such as knitwear, and longer staple lengths for worsted cloths for suiting. Staple strength is the force required to break apart a lock of wool by pulling it at the ends. This tells the manufacturer how well the fibres will cling together in spinning. It has its modern measurement in newtons per kilotex. The quality of the wool is also determined by the place along the staple where it will break if force is applied to try to pull it apart: at the base, in the middle or at the tip of the lock.

  Crimp is the number of waves along the length of each fibre, which is reflected in the waves along the length of each staple. Finer fibres with a high Bradford Count usually have a tighter crimp with more waves per centimetre of their length and are not suitable for worsted cloths because they are not easy to flatten out, so they are mostly used for high quality woollen knitwear. Crimp is caused by each fibre having cells of two different types arranged into two distinct groups, one on each side of the fibre, and one group expanding further than the other and bending the fibre. Its natural function is to add bulk to a fleece to trap a greater volume of air between the fibres and give the sheep greater insulation from the elements.

  At its height, English wool was nearly as valuable as the finest Merino wool from Spain, with the difference that the best English wool was longer-stapled (and probably lustred) whereas the Merino was like the Lemster Ore, short-stapled with fibres nearly as fine as silk. The best long-staple English lustre wool came from around Lincoln and Stamford. And the best and most lustrous of all came from the sheep that grazed the coastal plain between Boston and Louth. It is not known why this should be. One (rather fanciful) theory is that it was the effect on the fleece of the moist misty air and heavy morning dews laden with sea-salt.

  The lustre or natural sheen of these wools is caused by the scales of each fibre turning inwards and presenting a smooth, shiny and more rounded edge to the surface. Lustre is a feature of a few high-quality wools and gives the sheen to worsted cloth. Lustre wools take dyes readily and give strong clear colours to the cloth. Worsted cloth is named after the Norfolk village of Worstead, and is made by a spinning process that provides tight and smooth fabric which recovers quickly from creasing. That is why lustre wools are more valuable than ordinary wool.

  Fulling scours and mills the cloth in one operation: scouring removes the oils and dirt in an alkaline solution, and milling shrinks and firms it. Felting is an extreme form of milling by which the cloth is beaten into a kind of mat by intensifying the natural propensity of the fibres to cling together. The Romans scoured their cloth by immersing the bolts in vats of stale human urine (which was carefully preserved for the process) and then having slaves tread them. Not surprisingly by medieval times fuller’s earth was preferred. This is a type of clay with the power to absorb the lanolin and cleanse the wool of impurities. The difference between worsteds and woollens, which obviates the need for fulling, is that the long-staple wools used in worsted fabrics are combed to make the fibres lie parallel to each other in the same direction – ‘butt end to tip’, i.e. from the end that was cut during shearing to the tip of each fibre. The process removes the wool’s natural crimp, straightens it and causes the fibres to cling together.

  Between the 1850s and the 1920s, when the Lincoln was still a force in the land, many thousands were exported for cross-breeding to create the sheep of the New World. The flocks of South America, Australia and New Zealand were bred from the Lincoln, and then during the twentieth century Argentina and Russia also bought rams to improve their wool flocks. In New Zealand they went to create the Polwarth, a dual-purpose wool and meat breed, one-quarter Lincoln and three-quarters Spanish Merino, and the Corriedale, a quarter Merino and three-quarters Lincoln. There are now estimated to be 100,000,000 of these two breeds grazing the southern hemisphere.

  But by 1971 fewer than 500 breeding Lincoln ewes remained in fifteen small flocks. Numbers increased a little in the 1980s and have stabilised at about 700, most kept for sentimental reasons. There is a minor upsurge of interest in the breed from hobby farmers that may well ensure its survival, but not as a commercial proposition unless wool becomes much more valuable. It is poignant that a breed which for more than a thousand years grew a large part of the wool that made England rich, and provided one half of the genes that created two of the most successful wool-producing breeds in the New World, should be so diminished.

  During the second half of the last century wool became a nuisance. Its value was so low, for so long, that most British sheep farmers could not have cared less what happened to their wool after it left the farm. No longer would the wool cheque pay the farm rent. Farmers just needed their sheep to be clipped as quickly as possible, largely for the good of the sheep. Things have begun to look up slightly in the last few years, but the recent modest increases in price have to be compared with their lowest point, when it cost more to shear most sheep than their wool was worth. Farmers took to burning it or burying it rather than losing money by paying to have it hauled to their nearest wool depot. Recently, in another British initiative, the Campaign for Wool, whose patron is Prince Charles, has done much to promote wool worldwide; coupled with a reduction in supply because the world’s sheep flock has been reduced, the market price has risen about threefold, but wool is still an insignificant part of a sheep farmer’s income.

  But all this wool from big sheep, like the Lincoln, comes at a price. They can carry so much wool, especially if they are heavily in lamb, that it can make them top-heavy and vulnerable to being cast, i.e. rolling onto their backs and being unable to stand up again. When this happens the fermenting vegetable matter in the rumen, the largest stomach, blocks the outlet of gas to the oesophagus, it builds up, the rumen swells, the heart stops and they quickly die. They are also susceptible to fly-strike because, when they eat lush spring and summer grass their wool can become soiled by scour (diarrhoea to you and me). It is easy to spot a dirty fleece on a shortwoolled sheep, but heavy-woolled Lincolns, in warm damp weather, have to be inspected regularly, because the fleece can appear clean on the outside, and yet hide a multitude of horrors beneath. The fly strikes silently, its eggs hatching into maggots deep in the wool, without any outward sign. The remedy for this is dagging. When the fly is most active in early summer, all soiled wool must be clipped away. It is a dirty, back-breaking job that needs great care with the shears, because flies are nearly as fond of wounds as they are of muck.

  The blue- or greenbottle ‘fly’ is attracted by the smell of decay. Leave a piece of meat out of the fridge for a few hours in summer and you will see how quickly tiny white fly’s eggs appear on its surface in clusters. It is the same with a dirty fleece. Little blind creamy maggots soon hatch out and burrow into the moist areas, where they immediately begin to gorge themselves first on dead, then on living flesh, and if they are not stopped they will eat the animal alive. Once the feeding starts, the smell from decaying flesh and maggots attracts more flies, which lay more eggs that hatch into more maggots and the animal is quickly overwhelmed.

  During the early stages of fly-strike the afflicted sheep becomes mildly restless, sitting down and standing up and moving around pointlessly. Within a day or so it becomes more uneasy, sometimes shaking its legs in a sort of involuntary dance, stretching its neck backwards and nibbling frenziedly at its hindquarters. Very soon it will be unable to lie or stand still, moving around compulsively, regularly emitting moans and noises, as it is tortured by the maggots. Sometimes it will try to bite at them where they are feeding, and show signs that it is being tormented by the pain. In the terminal stages of infestation the animal’s will is broken and it leaves the flock to hide away and die.

  Sheep can also get maggots in their feet, attracted by the smell of decay caused by foot rot. At first this can be beneficial because they will eat away the rot, but if they aren�
�t caught in time they move on to the living flesh. Fly-strike is one of the nastiest things a shepherd has to deal with, although its worst excesses are controlled by modern dipping. I once came across a young sheep that was being pestered by swarms of bluebottles. It hadn’t the energy to run off and I immediately saw why. The fleece attached to a large strip of putrid skin around its hindquarters and along its back and flanks came away in my hand to reveal a seething mass of maggots gorging on its flesh. They wriggled out of its anus and vulva, which they had partly eaten away, and dropped bloated to the ground, sated on their living victim. The sheep moaned and strained, and hundreds more poured out, blindly burrowing into the grass. The stink of putrefaction had to be smelled to be believed. I retched as I dragged the doomed creature to the nearest tree to tie it, while I ran home to get my gun.

  If wool breeds like the Lincoln are to survive in the modern meat-producing world it is ladies with a paddock, like Louise Fairburn, who will keep them going. The Lincoln and all the other wool breeds that commercial farmers can no longer afford to keep would not last five years without them.

  In their native Lincolnshire, Lincoln sheep seem at one with their landscape – their creamy wool tones perfectly with the limestone walls. It might just have been in my imagination, but these sheep seem to be part of the soil upon which they have lived for nearly two millennia and have taken on its hues. I also fancied I could see something of the ancient Roman lineage in their proud bearing and a gentle grace that out-classes less noble, utilitarian breeds.

  3

  THE NEW LEICESTER

  My people want fat mutton and I give it to them … Sheep for the keelmen, pitmen and all such hardworking people are never too fat for people of these descriptions.

  Robert Bakewell

  MOST OF US AT SOME TIME OR ANOTHER WILL have come across a couple of rather unprepossessing-looking parents who seem to have bred a good-looking daughter. She bears so little resemblance to either of them that we are driven to wonder where on earth she came from. An uncharitable observer might speculate that her mother had not been entirely faithful to her father, or that some mix-up could have occurred in the maternity unit. But then, on closer inspection, we might notice that some of her more pleasing features could have come from her mother: her nose, her hair, her ankles or whatever. Then if we look a little more carefully her eyes might have come from her father, and the tone of her skin and the way she holds herself. Then we notice that the reason she is so much more attractive than either of her parents is that she has inherited the best features of each and the worst are nowhere to be seen.

  That is the effect that Robert Bakewell’s New (or Dishley) Leicester sheep had on nearly every breed it was crossed with. The result was startling – hence the sobriquet ‘The Great Improver’. It did not improve every aspect of every type it was crossed with; some, such as the Lincoln and Ryeland, whose wool deteriorated, were badly affected by the match and never recovered from the infusion of Leicester blood. But it always had a striking effect, particularly in the carcase, and when its effect was beneficial, it imbued its offspring with just those characteristics that were needed to bring them into the modern age.

  As the eighteenth century opened, sheep farming operated largely as it had done for over 500 years; wool and tallow (for candles) were still the most valuable part of the sheep, with its manure an aid to soil fertility, particularly on thinner soils. Distinct breeds, as we know them today, had not yet been developed; rather there were types which had become adapted to the soil they lived on by long association and had changed little over the previous centuries. Some were Longwools and, like the old Teeswater, by today’s standards huge ungainly car-cases of mutton clothed in as much long-staple wool as they could carry; others were smaller and grew shorter wool; some were white-faced, others black-faced, some horned in both sexes, others only horned in the rams, and some were polled in both sexes. But the thing they nearly all had in common was that they were not meant to be eaten, or at least not when young. It was considered wasteful to eat animals that were barely grown and immature, especially before they had had the opportunity to give a fleece of wool. And by the time they were mature enough to eat, their meat was often unpalatable, stringy and tough, coming as it did from three- or even four-year-old animals.

  These types of sheep had served well enough for many centuries, to satisfy the market for wool at home and abroad, but they proved wanting when faced with the growing demand for meat from a newly urbanised population that needed somebody else to grow their food for them. And the transformation that ensued was, in its way, as far-reaching in the eighteenth century as the development of the internet and the telecommunications revolution have proved in the twenty-first.

  Farming, the most traditional of occupations, which works with the unvarying cycle of the seasons, does not lend itself easily to radicalism. In earlier times, most farmers resisted change because one bad decision could lead to ruin and the destitution that was never far away. A farmer would either have to have been a madman or a prophet to risk going against the wisdom of the centuries. That is why many eschewed, or probably were never aware of, the opportunities for profit that beckoned to those who could give the people what they wanted. It was left to a handful of farsighted pioneers, during a few short decades in the middle of the eighteenth century, to recognise that they stood on the brink of a revolution.

  Into this world of opportunity emerged Robert Bakewell of Dishley Grange in Leicestershire, who was probably a bit of a madman and certainly a lot of a prophet. He was born on 23 May 1725 and while still a young man began the experiments on his father’s farm that so radically changed the face of livestock breeding right across the world. Before the emergence of men like Bakewell, medieval stockbreeding had been a haphazard affair, described by one writer as the union of nobody’s son with anybody’s daughter. Bakewell was probably not the originator of the new breed, but he refined and brought to the pitch of success the transformation that others had already begun, notably Joseph Allom, another remarkable Leicestershire man, somewhat overlooked in the clamour over Bakewell’s achievement, who deserves considerable credit in that he ‘raised himself by dint of industry from a plowboy, and thereafter raised the old Leicester sheep from its medieval mediocrity’.

  Bakewell took over the tenancy of Dishley Grange after his father’s death in 1760, and made its name synonymous with his new breed of sheep, the Dishley (or New) Leicester. His achievement was to create a breed from the old Leicester Longwool that became the fulcrum between the ancient wool-producing types and all the modern meat breeds. There is not a breed of sheep in the industrial societies of the Western world that does not have at least a little of the blood of Bakewell’s Dishley Leicester running in its veins.

  During a few years in the middle of the eighteenth century Bakewell took this slow-to-mature, long, weak-in-the-frame old Leicester, described at the time as ‘a loose and irregular, slow-feeding, coarse-grained carcase of mutton’, and transformed it into a quick-growing, hornless, short-legged, barrel-shaped animal with a greater proportion of meat to bone than nearly any other type. He reduced the inedible parts of the carcase – the bone in particular – and in so doing produced more meat from each animal for the least consumption of food, in the shortest possible time. And surprisingly, despite its being created within the course of only a couple of decades, the new sheep bred true to type; in other words, its offspring had the same characteristics as their parents. Bakewell’s insight was that he ‘perfectly understood the relation which exists between the external form of an animal and its aptitude to become fat in a short time’. His sheep were described at the time as being always ‘semi-fat’, i.e. they carried a covering of flesh with a thin layer of fat over it, and therefore could be finished for slaughter in a much shorter time than other breeds.

  ‘Fat’ in this context needs some explanation. It is nearly synonymous with ‘mature’ and means that the animal has reached a stage of growth at which it has de
veloped all the muscle that it ever will and has begun to lay down a covering of fat over its carcase and within its muscles. It is very far from the popular understanding of fat as being obese. A fat sheep is more like a lean healthy athlete with well-formed muscles. Bakewell sought to breed a sheep that became fat, i.e. matured, at a younger age than the great, donkey-like, rangy Longwool sheep, and with less bone and offal and with smaller joints of high-quality meat for the tables of his ‘people’. Bakewell memorably declared ‘all is useless that is not beef’. By this he meant that the part of a carcase of a grazing animal that farmers ought to be aiming for was the most valuable cuts of meat, not bone or wool or fat.

  The traditionalists, particularly the prominent breeders of the old Lincoln sheep, complained that his innovations were ruining their breed’s main attribute, its valuable wool. This criticism was not without foundation. But they seemed unable to foresee the tremendous increase in urban demand for meat and that the wool was an inevitable sacrifice. Bakewell was prepared to admit that his emphasis on carcase was damaging the wool of the breed that had once made England rich, but he thought it a price worth paying, as is shown by his reply to the Lincoln breeders’ criticism: ‘it is impossible for sheep to produce mutton and wool in equal ratio: by strict attention to the one, you must, in a great degree, let go the other.’