Footsteps in the Furrow. Andrew Arbuckle
Some twenty-eight of the cottages remain, but not one of these provides accommodation for a farm worker. With one exception, work on the farms is carried out by the farmers themselves, or by contractors coming in with seeders or harvesters. The one remaining full-time agricultural worker lives in Cupar – some twenty years after he left the tied house in which I now live.
All the cottages and the parish school and church are now occupied by those who commute from their rural base into the towns and cities. In contrast with the tied housing of a previous generation, many are now owned by those who live in them.
The local primary school has been closed for the past thirty years, and today’s children are collected and deposited, morning and night, by a taxi service that takes them six miles to the nearest rural school. The church has also closed its doors. It sits, roofless, surrounded by a graveyard. Headstones tell of the farmers and workers of previous years. For most of the day, this quiet country road is almost deserted, following the early-morning dash to work until the return journeys in the evening.
Recording the changes
Some twenty years ago, when I gave up active farming to write about agriculture in the Dundee Courier, I would occasionally refer back to farming practices of previous generations. Descriptions of the machine harvesting of potatoes compared with the hand picking of the crop would bring forth letters full of such memories. Similarly, comments on how the Scottish summer raspberry crop would largely be picked by holidaying Glaswegians resulted in phone calls, recalling those seemingly halcyon days. Even reports on relatively mundane heavy physical work, such as dung spreading, seemed to provoke fond memories.
Although the husbandry learned more than half a century ago is still relevant, many of the skills gathered at that time, when labour was an essential of good farming, are no longer part and parcel of farming life. For example, being able to mark out ‘bits’, as the sections of the field were called at potato picking time, lies in the basket of skills now laid to one side and labelled redundant. Likewise, an ability to measure out the capacity of a straw stack is an attribute that now moulders away in the recesses of a few elderly minds.
Apart from the skills skittering away from modern man’s brain cells, many of the customs and practices linked to farming in the last century have disappeared. Gone are the days of labour hierarchy on the farms. With no farm grieves (working farm managers) and no orramen (‘ordinary’ farm workers), this ladder of rural social life has lost its rungs. Gone is the chat or crack between the team of men on the farm and the loon, often a callow youth who was always on the butt end of any prank, or joke – such as sending him for a load of postholes or a tin of tartan paint.
This book is an attempt to shine a light on life on farms in the previous century and to capture some of those work practices and pictures of a rural landscape from yesteryear. It does not pretend to be a history of farming. Although the major events shaping the industry are recorded, they are there merely as directional markers, not part of a definitive history. Nor does it have any pretensions to be a sociological record of rural life: that would be too grandiose an ambition for what is no more than a collection of memories.
The great temptation when looking back into the past is to forget the downside to a simpler way of life and to remember only the good parts. While everyone remembers the camaraderie, few will talk of the harshness of life, where a wage earner’s illness or accident would quickly leave a family clinging onto the proverbial bread line. And while there are happy recollections of harvest fields full of workers, the reality of those days was also one where working conditions were often unpleasant, sometimes severely so.
Pictures of rows of workers standing outside the stables holding their horses reflect the pride and fellowship of the work in the era of the dominant horse. But the photographer was not on hand when those same men were out ploughing in the sleet and rain; sometimes sheltering under the horse with just with an old sack over the shoulders to keep the worst of the weather at bay. I hope that in these memories a fair approach has been taken, one that recognises that some parts were good, especially the camaraderie, and others were not so great.
The physical boundaries of the stories are mainly kept to those around my calf country, that of North-East Fife, but there is a well known saying in the Scottish farming industry and that is, ‘If you want to see the whole country but do not have the time, then just go to Fife.’ It may be one of the most cliched descriptions of the county, but calling it ‘a beggar’s mantle fringed with gold’ describes the rich, fertile coastal strips surrounding the slightly poorer land in the centre.
I have also no doubt that many of the practices recalled within these pages have similarity with those from other areas. The geography is no more than a sampler onto which memories and stories are stitched. One further qualification: this is not a personal history, or even a history of my own family. In farming terms, the Arbuckle family was no different from many others in their origins and work. To their cost, they might have dabbled more deeply in the politics of farming than most, but that is not part of the story.
My own little store of memories and family records has been greatly augmented by the many kind friends who spoke openly of their recollections of times gone past. The verbal harvesting of customs and practices of the older generation has been one of the joys and happiness of this work.
I hope your reading of this book will either tug at your own personal memories, or, if you are of a younger generation, provide an insight to how life used to be down on the farm.
ANDREW ARBUCKLE
Newburgh, Fife, 2009
MY grandfather, John Arbuckle, was brought up on the family farm on the outskirts of Bathgate in the industrial heartlands of Scotland. He was reputed to have married one day, and the very next morning to have taken his new bride and all the possessions essential to taking the tenancy of a farm off in a horse-drawn cart to their new home in Angus.
There is no record of the length of time this journey took in the first decade of the last century but it would have retraced the steps of the drovers who, in the 100 years prior to that, brought cattle and sheep down from the hills and glens to the big Tryst at Falkirk.
The new couple set up home on a small farm outside Glamis in Angus, where they lived and worked for a number of years before a bigger tenancy came along.
And that was how my family came into the county of Fife. The slightly circuitous route may have been unusual, but all through the first half of last century, there was a tidal flow of new farming blood coming into Fife from smaller family farms in the wetter west of Scotland. Such was the scale of this migration that by the 1950s there were very few farmers in Fife unable to trace their roots back west. There were a number of reasons for this, but the biggest single factor lay in the economic benefits from the increased options provided by farming in the east of Scotland.
The east-coast climate allows a wider range of crops to be grown and the soils are generally better than the wet, heavier land in the west. Grass has always grown well in the west, but as Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns, knew to his cost, growing crops in Ayrshire was not an easy option.
Those migrating from the west did not all come east; many went south, where the land was again of a better quality and the climate drier and warmer than their homelands. The nature of migration is such that the successful pioneers who blazed a trail into new territory tended to get the message back home. This sets up a second wave of migration and more hopefuls head towards the Promised Land. To this day, there are farming villages in Lincolnshire, Essex and Bedford where those of Scottish origin dominate.
Although not used by my grandfather, the migration into the east was made much easier by the network of