NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN.

[Stanley]

NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN.

09 August 2001

One of the unalterable rules of life is that whenever a subject of national interest crops up, the ‘experts’ come out of the woodwork and tell us what they think we should know about the matter in hand, Foot and Mouth disease has been no exception. No, don’t worry, this isn’t a lecture on the present outbreak which shows no signs yet of stopping, it’s a look at cattle and other matters which may shed a little light on some of the misconceptions which have been put about lately by the ‘experts’.
Let’s have a look at the large scale movement of animals around the country, to hear the experts talk you would think that this was a new phenomenon. Whilst I will admit that many more journeys are made nowadays, it is a mistake to think that this is new. There are many reasons for moving animals, the simplest is the need to move fresh meat on the hoof from the area where it was fattened to the place where it is needed for food. This transfer of beasts from country areas to the place of consumption has been going on ever since men started to live in towns and cities. Getting the animals there under their own steam was perfect common sense, they were slaughtered in the towns and cities and the meat arrived fresh on the table.
This reason for moving cattle has now died out with modern refrigerated transport and large centralised slaughter houses. Far from increasing, the flow of cattle and other animals into towns and cities has ceased entirely. This applies to fresh milk as well, before the advent of rail transport the only way to guarantee fresh milk in a large town or city was to keep the cows in sheds near to the population and milk them there, they never saw the light of day and hence had short lives. The demand for fresh milk cattle for the ‘cow-keepers’ meant even more animals being driven into the towns.
Another reason for moving animals is that some areas like Scotland and Wales whilst ideal for breeding and rearing stock are not the best place to fatten them. To this day, there is a big trade in store animals which are reared in Wales and Scotland and then brought down to the lowland pastures in England to be fattened for market. The ‘Great North Road’ was a favourite route from Scotland and during the year August 1777 to August 1778, 28,551 cattle passed through Wetherby on their way south.
Cattle and sheep weren’t the only stock which were moved., geese, turkeys and pigs were also moved in droves. Daniel Defoe, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, talked about up to 500 flocks of turkeys a year being brought out of Norfolk into London and there was a similar trade in geese. These birds gave the drovers a bit of a problem because they got footsore when moved for long distances. The cure for this was to drive the flock through a bath of warm pitch followed by another bath of sawdust and sand mixed. If this was done several times it formed a hard wearing skin on the birds feet which lasted for quite a distance and fell off leaving them with clean, undamaged feet. Geese would quite happily rest on the ground at night but turkeys presented another problem, they needed to roost in trees!
Cattle were often shod with iron shoes. Being cloven hoofed they needed eight shoes apiece. The blacksmith at Grassington used to make shoes and nails and take them to Threshfield and Skipton where he shod cattle for eight pence (old money) a beast in the late nineteenth century. One man could shoe about seventy beasts in a day. These shoes were a valuable by-product of the droving trade, when the animals were slaughtered the used shoes and nails were shipped back up the country to where they were needed.
The men who moved the stock were the drovers, a hardy breed who tended to pass the trade on from father to son. They guarded their craft jealously as there were stringent conditions attached to the trade. Under an Act passed in the reign of Elizabeth the First a drover had to be a married householder of at least thirty years of age. He had to obtain a licence in writing from at least three magistrates which only lasted for one year, there were heavy fines for anyone found contravening this Act of Parliament. There was good reason for this licensing, the drover had plenty of scope for dishonesty. He was entrusted with a large number of valuable animals and if he lost some on the way how was anyone to tell whether this was due to accident, sickness or theft?
The drover was, in effect, a cattle dealer as he was responsible for the sale of the animals at their final destination and the return of the proceeds of sale to the original owner. Remember that there wasn’t a banking system as we know it today and the money had to be transported as cash at great risk. I have read somewhere that a drover wasn’t allowed to go bankrupt, he was always liable for his debts. This would supposedly give his customers better protection.
In 1634 King Charles the First defied Parliament and raised a tax which was supposedly for the maintenance of the navy. It was called Ship Money and he levied it three years in succession until the Long Parliament rescinded the tax in 1638. What’s this got to do with droving cattle? Simple, the safest way to transport the Ship Money from the outlying towns to London was to buy cattle with it and drive them to London. When they were sold, the tax was paid by the drover and any profit was a bonus for the town who had sent the cattle.
There is much more to tell about the drovers, for instance, they had wonderful dogs and there are many accounts of the dogs being sent home by themselves, sometimes even leading a pack horse and staying at the same inns each night that the drover stopped at on his way down the country. If you want to learn more, ask at the library for a book called ‘The Drovers’ by K J Bonser. It is where I learned much of my knowledge about droving in the old days and I recommend it to you all.
As many of you will remember I was a drover myself for many years when I drove a cattle wagon for Drinkall’s at West Marton. The same tides of cattle I have been describing in the 17th and 18th centuries were still flowing up and down the country then. Good calves went from Craven up into Scotland and milking heifers and young beef stock came down into Lancashire and further south. One firm of hauliers I knew in Scotland did nothing but carry pigs down to London for slaughter. The capital’s appetite for meat is even greater now than in the 17th and 18th centuries because of the rise in population.
So, when the ‘experts’ talk about the ‘unnecessary’ movement of stock around the country, they may have a point in some cases but by far the greater proportion of movements is ancient and necessary. They also talk of the cruelty of moving animals. Undoubtedly this does exist, no trade or profession is entirely free of rogues, but this doesn’t mean that all drovers are culpable. When I was moving cattle we took a pride in getting animals to their destination in good condition. We had to be drivers, mechanics, vets and midwives all at the same time. Properly looked after, cattle could come out of the box after 300 miles on the road in better condition than when they went in. I remember bringing some cattle into Gisburn Auction Market one day while a sale was on. I backed the wagon and trailer on to the docks, closed the gates at the back and let the cattle out to do whatever they wanted while I found Richard my boss.
I was accosted by a well-meaning animal rights activist who berated me for cruelty, she had seen me unloading the cattle. I took her back round to the wagon to ask her to show me exactly what my crime was and when we got there, the cattle had loaded themselves back into the boxes of their own accord. Even she had to admit that they didn’t seem to be terrorised!
We need to look at foot and mouth disease now. If you get your Old Testament out and look at Exodus, Chapter 9 verse 3 you will find: ‘Behold, the hand of the Lord is upon thy cattle which is in the field, upon the horses, upon the asses, upon the camels, upon the oxen and upon the sheep. There shall be a very grievous murrain.’
‘Murrain’ is a portmanteau word which was used until the 19th century to describe any cattle disease which killed. It probably derives from the Latin ‘mori’, or ‘death’. Foot and mouth wasn’t known in this country until 1839 and the diseases referred to before that were probably mainly ‘cattle plague’ otherwise known as ‘rinderpest’, in the 18th century over 200,000,000 cattle died in Europe from this disease. In 1745 at least 200,000 cattle died in England and the only remedy was to kill the infected animals and bury them. In 1863 and 1865 there were outbreaks of the plague, the latter being brought into Hull by live cattle shipped from Russia and killing 400,000 cattle, it was finally brought under control in 1869. In 1878 the Contagious Diseases (Animals) Act was passed which imposed strict controls and allowed the payment of compensation to farmers.
There were some weird and wonderful cures. One was to dose the animal with a quart of old urine mixed with half a handful of hen’s dung! A favourite preventative measure was to drive the cattle through the smoke from old straw and manure which was burned in heaps. The bottom line is that neither Foot and Mouth disease or the payment of compensation by the government is new. In 1714, George I paid almost £7,000 out of his Privy Purse for cattle killed in an outbreak of rinderpest in Islington.
As I said in the title of this piece, there is nothing new under the sun. Up to now we have lost over 3,500,000 head of stock in the present outbreak and the figure will go much higher. It has been said that this is the worst outbreak ever in the developed world. It would seem that if we look carefully at history, this might be a bit of an exaggeration. Cattle and other farm animals do occasionally get diseases and if it is very infectious, they have to be slaughtered for the common good. This is why compensation is paid and the government should think twice before changing this. Perhaps they should read Stanley's View?

SCG/09 August 2001