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Chris Stewart, George Henderson - Slightly Foxed Issue 25

Farmer George

Back in the Seventies I fell under the spell of farming. On those long, lonely agricultural nights I would pore for entertainment over weed identification charts, tractor maintenance manuals and George Henderson’s The Farming Ladder (1944). Recently I decided to read the latter again, to see how both Henderson and I had fared in the intervening years.

The Farming Ladder describes the author’s experience of restoring a dilapidated farm in the Cotswolds between the wars. It’s an oft-told story, but Henderson brings to it the authenticity of a real farmer. He takes us from his first unpromising sight of Oathill Farm with its cold barren fields and shabby buildings, right through the relentless process of turning it into a going concern and a model of good agricultural practice. On the way he paints a revealing picture of farming in the Forties and, unintentionally, a portrait of himself, the archetypal Forties farming man. The book is also an impassioned plea to farmers to cherish and respect the land (Henderson’s capitals). To me, with my incipient longing for the soil, Henderson and his book were an inspiration.

In his time Henderson was something of a farming guru, and The Farming Ladder achieved the status of a classic. Sales of the book and its successor, Farmer’s Progress (1950), were swollen by demobilization, when thousands of young men, returning from the war to a desperate economy, considered taking up farming. As a result Henderson was able to boast that, while it took him a day to earn a pound on the farm, with his pen he could earn it in an hour. A pound an hour? That was a pound for a thousand words, for Henderson wrote as he lived; at a pace few men now could maintain.

Henderson’s working day started at 4.30 a.m. and continued until 7 p.m., or until darkness fell in times of harvest. Sunday was the only day off, once he had fed and watered the livestock. He was a driven man, living

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Back in the Seventies I fell under the spell of farming. On those long, lonely agricultural nights I would pore for entertainment over weed identification charts, tractor maintenance manuals and George Henderson’s The Farming Ladder (1944). Recently I decided to read the latter again, to see how both Henderson and I had fared in the intervening years.

The Farming Ladder describes the author’s experience of restoring a dilapidated farm in the Cotswolds between the wars. It’s an oft-told story, but Henderson brings to it the authenticity of a real farmer. He takes us from his first unpromising sight of Oathill Farm with its cold barren fields and shabby buildings, right through the relentless process of turning it into a going concern and a model of good agricultural practice. On the way he paints a revealing picture of farming in the Forties and, unintentionally, a portrait of himself, the archetypal Forties farming man. The book is also an impassioned plea to farmers to cherish and respect the land (Henderson’s capitals). To me, with my incipient longing for the soil, Henderson and his book were an inspiration. In his time Henderson was something of a farming guru, and The Farming Ladder achieved the status of a classic. Sales of the book and its successor, Farmer’s Progress (1950), were swollen by demobilization, when thousands of young men, returning from the war to a desperate economy, considered taking up farming. As a result Henderson was able to boast that, while it took him a day to earn a pound on the farm, with his pen he could earn it in an hour. A pound an hour? That was a pound for a thousand words, for Henderson wrote as he lived; at a pace few men now could maintain. Henderson’s working day started at 4.30 a.m. and continued until 7 p.m., or until darkness fell in times of harvest. Sunday was the only day off, once he had fed and watered the livestock. He was a driven man, living in a time when men needed to be driven in order to pull themselves and their country out of the post-war depression. As one might expect, he did not suffer fools gladly, and the pages of the book are sprinkled with examples of layabouts getting their just deserts. ‘Beware the three fatal S’s’, he admonishes: ‘smoking, swearing and standing about.’ As for me, I’ve always wanted to be a smoker, I am far from averse to a well-turned oath on occasion, and I feel that in a relentless sixteen-hour day a little standing about is more than justified. But then I come from a different generation: born in the Fifties, we reaped the benefits that those driven men, the Hendersons of the pre-war generation, had sown. At the time I was engrossed in The Farming Ladder I greatly admired the qualities that Henderson considered essential to farming: earnestness, physical stamina, assiduous attention to detail, and nimbleness of mind coupled with acute powers of observation; and indeed still do. Henderson himself possessed all these.

In the first five and a half years we did not miss a single milking, in fact only on three occasions did we take a few hours off during all that time . . . every penny we could find [we] reinvested in stock and on the land, we had neither the time nor the money for amusements. Our only recreation, apart from reading (for our friends were very good in lending us books), was the study on Sunday afternoons of the geology, botany, archaeology, and kindred subjects within walking distance of the farm.

Even while on his scant holidays Henderson never let up. He describes how while on holiday in Scotland he undertook a long drive and then a gruelling walk across the mountains. Arriving at the finish, he decided to walk all the way back in order to accompany some friends who were without a guide. Of course it was nothing for him, as he was used to walking something over a thousand miles behind the plough between spring and autumn. After a time, though, this catalogue of relentless achievement started to niggle, and I began to seek out chinks in Henderson’s armour, but even here he pre-empted me:
To some this book will appear egotistical and boastful, and the writer regrets that he cannot strike the modest note that characterises the work of the best farmer-authors . . . To us farming is a very serious occupation, and successful farmers, like millionaires, seldom smile.
It would be easy, too, to carp at Henderson’s irrepressible taste for doggerel. In his chapter on farm labour, he cannot help quoting:

’Tis the same with common natures, Treat them kindly, they rebel. But be rough as nutmeg graters – And the rogues will serve you well.

But to be fair, back in those days a burst of doggerel was never far from anybody’s lips. In the absence of television people read, and inevitably they read verse, and with a head full of doggerel, well, it was hard to keep it in. Perhaps a certain sanctimony is endemic among farmers. I remember one of the reasons I was attracted to farming was that it seemed to be an honourable way of making a living. To me, as an adolescent hippie, the world of work offered too many opportunities for contemptible behaviour, whereas the care of the land and production of food for one’s fellow man was above criticism – a decent and useful existence in a world that seemed all too full of bent accountants and corrupt politicians. In the intervening years my memory of The Farming Ladder and its author had dimmed to a vague impression of unattainable ideals and earnestness, yet there had been more to it than that, and I was heartened when I found it. This paragon of doggèd virtue was not immune to the poetry and the beauty of the land. Thousands of dawns and sunsets, and countless springs and autumns, had imbued him with that particular spirituality that Nature sows in even the driest of hearts. Although in the early years at Oathill Farm the author believed ‘in very little that could not be proved by chemical analysis’, he could still write, ‘Josephine and Evelyn; how we loved those cows’, or ‘Nothing would compensate us for the pleasure of seeing the lambs playing in the spring sunlight, running races up and down the banks of our clear flowing stream, leaping over it and getting such fun out of life as only lambs can.’ But the piece that really reopened my heart to him was this description of an old shepherd whom the youthful Henderson had saved from being sent to an institution:
The same evening, as I approached his cottage, I saw him standing on a little hillock before the door, leaning on his long crook and with a plaid over his shoulder . . . As he turned to me, his long beard and his piercing eyes, burning bright with fever, gave him a druidical appearance. The setting sun shining through the clouds and throwing a halo round the great riven peak of Black Law behind him, completed the illusion. Before I could speak a word, he held up his hand. ‘My son,’ he said, ‘for what you have done today you will receive your reward. All that on which you set your heart will be achieved. Those that work with you will prosper, and any who work against you will be cast down. You will spend the best years of your life in a fat and sinful land, yet whenever you set foot upon the hills my spirit will guide and comfort you.’ What could I say? Two years before I had been confirmed in a fashionable London church. A well-fed and comfortable-looking bishop, exuding well-being from every pore, had laid his hands upon my head and intoned his apostolic blessing; and in my heart I had felt what a farce it was. Yet here in the shadow of the great hills, from this unwashed, half starved, but utterly sincere ascetic, who dwelling in the solitary places of the earth had found for himself many of the eternal truths, I seemed to receive something concrete; a real and driving force that would make his words come true.
Now you wouldn’t be taken by that sort of writing from just anybody, but from down-to-earth Henderson it rings true, as does his final heartfelt exhortation: ‘In the soil lies all that remains of the work of countless generations of the dead. We hold this sacred trust, to maintain the fertility and pass it on unimpaired to the unborn generations to come.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 25 © Chris Stewart 2010


About the contributor

Chris Stewart, never up to making a living from the land, has found himself obliged to supplement farm income by cunning use of the pen. A recent article in the Spanish press said that Señor Stewart writes much as he shears sheep . . . with which he was well satisfied.

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