Till the Cows Come Home Read online

  For many centuries, before and during the Roman occupation, cattle in the north-east of England seem to have been black. At the beginning of the third century, returning victorious from his Caledonian campaigns, the Emperor Septimus Severus arrived in York, where black beasts were to be offered up as a sacrifice for him in the temple of Bellona. He took it as a bad omen that animals of such colour were to be used, and forbade the sacrifice. But when the black cattle were freed by the priests, they followed him to the gates of his palace. The incident was seen (rightly, as it soon turned out) as presaging his death. Yet according to the Roman writer Varro, the Romans thought black was the best colour for cattle, followed by red, chestnut and white: ‘for a white coat indicates weakness, as black indicates endurance’. Dun (or sometimes red) cattle were the commonest colour.

  The dun cow is an ancient motif in English folklore, a fabulous animal that gives inexhaustible milk; hence the medieval saying that ‘the dun cow’s milk makes the prebend’s wife go in silk’. It appears in the seventh-century Lindisfarne Gospels as a short-horned ox, and is associated with St Luke. It also comes into the hagiography of St Cuthbert. After wandering the north for some years with the saint’s uncorrupted body, to fulfil their promise that they would never allow it to fall into the hands of pagans, the monks that comprised ‘the fraternity of St Cuthbert’ were searching for a place to bury him. They set down the bier carrying his coffin at a place (outside modern Durham) called Wurdelau – maybe Warden Law – and found they could not move it again. Aldhun, the Bishop of Lindisfarne, who was leading the group, decreed a three-day fast and prayers to determine the saint’s will as to where his body should lie. Bede says that during the fast, St Cuthbert appeared in a vision to a monk named Eadmer and told him that his coffin should be buried at ‘Dunholme’. But nobody knew where Dunholme was.

  A little while later, the monks overheard a milkmaid asking another woman if she had seen her lost dun cow, and being told that the beast was grazing ‘down at Dunholme’. They followed the girl and came upon a dun cow browsing in a wood high above a deep incised meander in the River Wear. This was where they buried St Cuthbert’s body. Aldhun became the first Bishop of Durham, and founded a shrine and a monastery dedicated to the saint. The two women and the dun cow are commemorated in a sculpture built into the north-west end of the eastern transept of Durham cathedral – and in the names of numerous pubs in the area.

  The story is more foundation myth than reliable account, because Dunholme must have been named after the cow was found there, not before. But it does tend to show that short-horned dun cattle were found in the north-east of England, particularly in County Durham, a thousand years before they came to prominence as the supreme dairy cow in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  Robert Trow-Smith, never slow to find Dutch influence in almost all our improved cattle, argues that the origins of the Shorthorn were in north Holland or west Friesland. He refers to a passage in Robert Payne’s Brief Description of Ireland (1589), in which Payne compares the best Irish cattle to the best he knew in England, which were ‘the better sort of Lyncolnshire breed’. If they did come from the Continent, which is almost certain, it must have been either before or in defiance of the statute 18 Car. II, which in 1666 prohibited the ‘importation of all great cattle’ as ‘a common nuisance’. This could explain why there is no official record of cattle being imported from Holland.

  In 1707, in The Whole Art of Husbandry, John Mortimer described Lincolnshire cattle as ‘pide’: ‘the best sort for the pail, only they are tender and need very good keeping, are the long legged short-horned cow of the Dutch breed which is to be had in some places of Lincolnshire, but mostly in Kent’. By the end of the eighteenth century, no trace of cattle of this type could be found in Kent, but they flourished in the northeast of England.

  Any Dutch origin was long denied by elite Shorthorn breeders, who wanted to promote their stock as coming from ‘some mythical, indigenous Old Adam of a beast …’ as Trow-Smith says. But it must be accepted that at some remote time, the Shorthorn came from the north-western seaboard of Europe, from Denmark to northern France, where for centuries a valuable type of cattle had existed. They were celebrated for the great quantities of milk they yielded, as well as an extraordinary aptitude to fatten, and were the basis of the large amounts of Dutch dairy produce exported in the late medieval period and into the modern era.

  The cattle called Holderness, named after that spit of fertile reclaimed land between Flamborough Head in the north and Spurn Point in the south, were known for their size. William Lawson, the parish priest at Ormesby, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, explained in A New Orchard and Garden in 1618: ‘The goodnesse of the soile in Howle, or Hollow-derness in Yorkshire … is well-known to all that know the … huge bulkes of their Cattell there.’ These cattle were said to be coarser and heavier than the native breeds, capable of reaching enormous sizes if properly fed, but without the quality of carcase or early maturity of either the later Shorthorn or many of the native breeds. Their flesh was described as having a ‘dark hue’ or ‘lyery’ – not marbled – because the lean was not interlarded with fat.

  George Culley explained in his Observations on Live Stock that ‘lyery’ or ‘double-lyered’, meant ‘black-fleshed’: ‘for, notwithstanding one of these creatures will feed to a vast weight, and though fed ever so long, yet will not have one pound of fat about it, neither within nor without, and the flesh (for it does not deserve to be called beef) is as black and coarse-grained as horse-flesh’. He described such cattle as ‘more like an ill-made black horse than an ox or a cow, bulky in the coarser points and small in the prime parts’. Their main merit was as extraordinary milkers, although their milk was lower in butterfat and solids-not-fat than the native Longhorn’s. They were not good breeders either, their calves being described by Marshall as ‘wide, square and scrawny across the hips’ and what he called ‘Dutch-arsed’. These big slow-feeding cattle produced the ‘Lincolnshire Ox’ exhibited at the University of Cambridge in the reign of Queen Anne. According to the advertisement, ‘He was Nineteen Hands High and Four Yards Long from his Face to his Rump. The like Beast for Bigness was never seen in the World before. Vivat Regina!’

  About eighty years later, a superior type, perhaps with origins in these coarse Holderness giants, emerged on the fertile banks of the River Tees. They were red, red and white, and (a favourite) strawberry roan. Their skin and flesh were ‘fine and mellow’ and their forequarters of great ‘depth and capacity’, according to Youatt. The best guess of their origin is that the coarse, leggy Holderness cattle had been taken in hand by a group of breeders in the Tees valley and, by unknown means, raised to be the astoundingly successful Shorthorn. The improvers almost certainly introduced a cross or two of other breeds into the Holderness to bring it closer to the ground, neaten its shape and improve its carcase fecundity and vigour. But, smaller though it was, the improved type was still capable of growing into a huge beast. A Mr Milbank of Barmingham in County Durham, one of the early improvers, slaughtered a home-bred ox at Barnard Castle in April 1789 at five years old. Dead weight, it was 177 stones 1½ pounds (almost 2,500 lb). The four quarters weighed 150 stones (2,100 lb), with 16 stones of tallow (224 lb), and even the hide weighed 10 stones 11 pounds (151 lb).

  This began over two centuries of intense interest in the Shorthorn. Their pedigrees were recorded and studied with almost as much assiduity as those of the aristocracy. Coates’s Herd Book, the Shorthorn breeders’ vade mecum, and the tribes and families recorded in it, was taken almost as seriously as Burke’s Landed Gentry. Coates, The Book of Martyrs and the Bible were the three essential reference books on many a nineteenth-century farmhouse table.

  It is said that Bakewell’s work showed that domestic animals’ valuable characteristics were inherited rather than the result of feeding and management. But this may be giving too much credit to the great showman. Even though, at the time, pedigrees were recorded exclusively th
rough the male line, it is hard to accept that intelligent breeders did not know the part inheritance from both parents played in the quality and performance of an animal. The Romans certainly recognized the value of inherited traits in both the male and female lines. Horace acclaimed the masculine: ‘’Tis of the brave and good alone/That good and brave men are the seed;/ The virtues, which their sires have shown,/Are found in steer and steed’; and Virgil the value of the maternal: ‘The generous youth who studious of the prize,/The race of running coursers multiplies,/Or to the plough the sturdy bullock breeds,/May know that from the dam the worth of each proceeds.’

  It might be that Bakewell showed that early maturity was an inherited trait, but it is hard to believe that cattle breeders could not see that for themselves before he based his reputation on it. It is true that much was done by eye and ‘handle’, and the ancestry of an animal was seldom known further back than a few decades in the memory of its breeder, but that is not to accept that breeders did not think it important to know how its ancestors had performed. They simply began to adopt a more rational scientific approach to measuring and recording the performance of their stock, in conformity with the spirit of the age.

  Shorthorn pedigrees go back to 1737, further than any other breed of cattle, when the same Mr Milbank bought a red-and-white bull from the Aislabie herd at Studley, which rather unimaginatively he called Studley Bull. This animal is the ancestor of all the most celebrated Shorthorns. The earliest female pedigree starts in 1760 with a cow called Tripes, from which descends the celebrated Princess (formerly Bright Eyes) family. Her dam was bred in 1739 by a Mr Stephenson of Ketton and was probably a daughter of Studley Bull. The story of Tripes’s descendants shows how much serendipity, coupled with the skill of the early breeders and an active market in cattle, went into making one of the most valuable and successful breeds the world has seen.

  At Stephenson’s sale in 1769, a John Hunter bought Tripes in calf. She produced a heifer, and because Hunter was ‘a person in indigent circumstances [had no land]’, he grazed his cow on the verges of the lanes around Hurworth, near Darlington, where he lived. In due time, the heifer was put to a bull owned by one George Snowdon and gave birth to a bull calf, which later became known as Hubback. Hunter sold the mother and her calf at Darlington market to ‘a Quaker’, who sold them on to a Mr Basnett, a timber merchant. On his way home, Basnett resold the calf for a guinea to a blacksmith named Natrass at Harrowgate near Darlington. Basnett took the cow home, but grazing on unaccustomed good land, she quickly got too fat to breed. This ‘quick feeding’ characteristic (using her food efficiently) she had passed on to her son. Natrass gave the bull calf to a young man at Hornby who became his son-in-law. The animal was much admired ‘by all who saw him running in the lanes’. He was then bought by a William Fawcett of Haughton Hill.

  The next part of the story has passed into myth and been retold in various versions. Youatt’s version, which he recounts in Cattle in 1834, was, he says, told to him by Mr Robert Waistell himself; it had appeared in a similar form in Bailey’s General Survey of the Agriculture of Durham in 1810. Another version is to be found in Cadwallader Bates’s book1 about his grandfather, recounted nearly a hundred years later without attribution, although he did have all Thomas Bates’s letters and papers.

  Mr Waistell used to ride almost daily by the meadow where the young bull was grazing, and so admired the beast that after a time he offered to buy him from the owner. The price Fawcett asked of eight guineas seemed excessive to Waistell, who refused to pay. However, as the weeks went by, Waistell grew fonder and fonder of the animal, until one day he took his friend and neighbour Robert Colling (1749–1820) to have a look at him. Colling rather grudgingly acknowledged that the beast had some good points, but there was something in his manner that caused Waistell to suspect he thought more highly of the beast than he was prepared to admit. So next morning Waistell hurried round to the bull’s owner, made the bargain and paid the money. Hardly had he done the deal when Colling turned up, and was disappointed to find he had missed his opportunity. On the way home, however, he persuaded Waistell that they should go ‘halvers’ on the bull, and Waistell sold him a half-share for four guineas.

  Some months passed, and either Waistell’s admiration for the animal waned or Colling had worked on him, because the partners sold the little bull to Robert’s brother Charles (1750–1836), who had recognized in the animal just the qualities he sought for furthering his breeding programme. Once he had him in his possession, Colling refused to allow anyone else to use the bull. To Waistell’s chagrin, Colling asked a fee of five guineas to serve one of Waistell’s cows. Waistell refused to pay the fee and reminded Colling that he had sold his half-share for four guineas. But he was no match for the formidable Colling brothers.

  Fate got its own back on Colling, however, because in 1787, ‘by an extraordinary error of judgement’, he sold the bull when it was ten years old to a ‘Mr Hubback from Newbiggin in Northumberland’ for 30 guineas. (It is likely that the purchaser was a Mr Huggup of Spital House, North Seaton, where his surname was pronounced locally Hubback.) The animal lived on to serve cows in the district for another three or four years; it is from this bull that almost all the superior Shorthorns descend. In 1790, the year before the vigorous beast’s death, Thomas Bates, whose influence on the Shorthorn surpassed all others in the nineteenth century, saw him and marvelled at the evidence of his remarkable prepotency still evident in his calves, even those that were bred out of unremarkable cows.

  The Collings’ breeding led to another famous bull, Foljambe (grandson of Hubback), who was the father of both the sire and dam of Favourite, which, when put to a ‘common cow’, engendered the celebrated Durham Ox born in early 1796. By February 1801, at five years old, this animal weighed 216 stones – 1.35 imperial tons. Deadweight, the carcase would have been 168 stones. The unfortunate animal was sold for £140 ‘into a fate of itinerant exhibition’ to a Mr Bulmer of Harmby near Bedale, who had a special carriage made to convey it around for showing.

  After five weeks, on 14 May 1801, Bulmer sold the bull and its carriage for £250 to a Mr John Day, who on the same day was offered and refused 500 guineas for the ensemble. A month later, Day refused £1,000, and on 8 July £2,000, preferring to travel with his bull around ‘the principal parts of England and Scotland’, which he did for six years. At ten years old, the ox weighed over 270 stones live weight (1¾ tons) – an estimated 220 stones deadweight. On 19 February 1807, the poor creature dislocated its hip and, after being jolted around for a further two months, had to be slaughtered on 15 April. Despite the considerable pain he must have suffered during his last two months, his carcase still weighed 186 stones (1.16 tons), of which the tallow was 11 stones (154 lb) and the hide 10 stones (140 lb).

  The poor old Durham Ox was not the only huge Shorthorn beast to be taken round in a cart and shown off. Even Robert Colling himself joined the fashion and traipsed the countryside with ‘The White Heifer That Travelled’. She was a freemartin, which is the female of male and female twins that has been made sterile in the womb by the blood vessels of the foetal sacs joining together and causing the foetuses to share the same blood circulation. Where both are of the same sex this does no harm, but if they are male and female, the male hormones give the female masculine characteristics. Ninety per cent of female twins are affected and born infertile, whereas the male twin is usually unaffected, although sometimes his testicles might be slightly smaller. Freemartins behave rather like bullocks (steers), being neither wholly male nor wholly female.2

  The most significant improvement in the breed came about when the Colling brothers got to work. Around 1780, Charles started collecting good females of the type he wanted. The Collings were not the first to see the eighteenth century’s need for ‘economical flesh’ – they had absorbed the gospel at the shrine of their old master Bakewell – but they were the first to make a success of the Dishley incestuous breeding methods, which they applied to
their Shorthorn stock. Bakewell never achieved the results he had hoped for from his efforts with the Longhorn (or the Leicester sheep, for that matter), whereas the Collings’ transformation of the local cattle into the Shorthorn was a spectacular and lasting success.

  Purists at the time, and since, tried to denigrate their work by doubting the bull Hubback’s purity. But as Charles Colling always admitted that he had used a cross of at least one other breed later in his career, complaints that the breed was somehow less valuable because its pedigree could not be traced back unalloyed to the Ark would condemn every superior breed of domestic livestock that has ever existed.

  Unlike the nineteenth-century improvers, who have bequeathed us an embarrassment of riches of genealogical material, those from the eighteenth century left us practically nothing. It is probably trite to say that the story of his art is to be found in an artist’s work, and had he wanted to express himself in a different way, he would have done so. It was no different with these early cattle improvers. They were single-minded, practical men of vision who brought all their talent and energy to their work in an atmosphere of intense competition in the early heady days of the Agricultural Revolution. And for those who got it right, there were ample fortunes to be made. So they were hardly likely to risk revealing their methods and allow their competitors to steal a march. If the Collings had learned nothing else from Bakewell, they certainly knew the benefit of keeping their methods obscure.

  At Charles Colling’s sale on 11 October 1810, 47 cattle (including bull and heifer calves under a year old) were sold for £7,115 17s. His light roan bull Comet, a son of Favourite, was the first bull ever to fetch 1,000 guineas – paid by a syndicate of four breeders. Eight years later, at his brother Robert’s sale, 61 head of cattle made 7,484 guineas. By this time, prices were falling, as the agricultural distress brought on by the ending of the war with France began to bite. In the two years from 1814 to 1816, farming passed from prosperity to an extreme depression that did not abate until the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837.