THE FARMER'S MAGAZINE. 



Ill 



THE HERDS OF GREAT BRITAIN. 



Chapter XIV. 

 THE FARNLEY HERD. 



A peep at Duchess 77th, who had " gone on" so 

 marvellously in the nine weeks since Warwick, that we 

 hardly knew her again, succeeded by a long attempt to 

 unravel the genealogy of a very compact little cow on 

 the road side, whose tail had been half bitten oft' by a 

 dog, and whose venerable mistress, as she fed her wilh 

 cabbage, dwelt on the fact she was " a good butter 

 thing," and that we were "not the fiist, by mony a 

 dozen, who'se stopped to ask where I gat her," are 

 the principal Shorthorn links in our mind, between 

 Brandsby and Farnley. We must not, however, forget 

 the grand fat beast which grazed up to its knees in a pas- 

 ture, and the still grander scorn of its owner, when we 

 asked hitfl, on the bridge, whether he was going to have 

 a try with it at the York Fat Show, and learnt for our 

 pains, that " we can grow and eat our own Christmas 

 beef in Masham." 



Our old foe, the drizzle and mist, was there before us, 

 when we alighted at Arthington station ; and even the 

 Wharfe, so beloved by tourists and photographers, which 

 we have so often longed to trace with them from its 

 source in the bleak moorlands, past Bolton Abbey, so 

 majestic in its calm decay, the water-healing Ben Rhyd- 

 ding, and on through thick woods and broad meadows, 

 to Wetherby, quite lost its charm for us in that chill 

 September morning. Our note-book was dropped back 

 moodily into our pocket, without one scenery re- 

 mark the entire three miles, and we felt that there would 

 be nothing for it, but to coincide with the observations 

 of a Yorkshire Directory, penned in a vein of descriptive 

 eloquence, hardly natural to man : " The Vale of the 

 Wharfe is adorned with elegant mansions, and the views 

 obtained from neighbouring elevations are at once noble 

 and commanding." 



And so old Coates must have thought from his heart, 

 as laden with weighty calf-records, and still weightier 

 bull data, beginning from Abelard, that descendant of 

 ♦' Booth's lame" and " Booth's old white" bulls, he 

 gained the top of the wooded ridge of Sheven, and pat- 

 ting his white mare's neck, descended on his winding road 

 to the homestead at Greenholme, which lay stretched, 

 westward of the little market town of Otley, like a land 

 of Shorthorn promise beneath. It was here that " The 

 Improved Durham Breed" found a home in those dreary 

 hopeless times which followed upon the Comet mania 

 and the war, when 30 guineas a season was a great bull 

 hire, and 80 gs. a marvellous purchase ; and the Americans 

 might well say, as the heavy yellow post chaise, or the 

 twice-a-week coach from Leeds bore them back again 

 south, that there was plenty of truth in the report, 

 which had got wafted across the Atlantic, that " There 

 were now not twenty such cows as Mr. Whitaker's any- 

 where." 



Like Lord Althorp, the Rev. H. Berry, Mr. Wiley, 

 Mr. W. F. Paley, and a few others, Mr. Whitaker never 

 bated one jot of heart or hope, and "the quiet after- 

 noons at Greenholme" have borne their rich fruit to 

 short horn breeders at last. Without his earnest aid, 

 Coates would never have ventured to bring out the first 

 volume of the Herd Book in 1822, when nothing but 

 " Corn and Currency" was on every English tongue, 

 and agrarian outrage and hunger were raging across the 

 channel. It was " printed by W. Walker, at the 

 Wharfdale Stanhope Press, top of the market-place, 

 Otley ;" and a manuscript copy of it is still preserved, 

 written out in Mr. Whitaker's own neat hand, and with 

 his red ink annotations, which now almost need a micro- 

 scope to decipher. It would seem as if he had walked 

 about for years with the images of every great cow or 

 bull firmly fixed in his retina. Of Duchess First he 

 merely says "fair;" of Duchess Second, "droops;" 

 while Hubback comes in among other criticisms for 

 '^flanh and tivist wonderful ; shoulders rather up~ 

 riffJit." Three-fourths of the original list of subscribers 

 have gone to their rest; and so too, within the last month 

 has the patriarchal James Ward, R.A., who condescended 

 to draw Maria and Miranda on the stone for the work, 

 and speculated on the coming fortunes of a certain 

 young self-taught mail driver. Herring of Doncaster, 

 who had also borne a hand and sketched the heifer 

 " Daffodil in two positions." A few years later, the 

 present editor of the Herd Book, then a mere lad of 

 fifteen, fresh from his school studies of the Durham ox 

 and Coates's Driffield cow, was sent over to paint Charles 

 (878) for the second volume, and like Culshaw, whose 

 boyish embassy to the same spot we have already nar- 

 rated, he dates his chief short horn impressions from that 

 weary journey, two-thirds on foot, and a third in the 

 carrier's cart. Tim Metcalfe the herdsman was also a 

 remarkable character in the Greenholme drama. He 

 " knew 'em when he saw 'em" as well as any man, but 

 as he never knew his alphabet, he invariably clenched 

 the matter with, " Give me t'pedigree, and I'll tak it 

 home V it maistcr." No wonder then that the taste for 

 Short-horns should have gradually spread along the 

 Wharfe, and not only brought new tenants to browse in 

 the pastures of Farnley, Broughton, and Denton 

 Park, but tempted the Duchess tribe to renew their 

 strength, in later years, near Wetherby. 



Mr. Fawkes's career as a breeder of Shorthorns may 

 be said to have begun in earnest with Mr. Whitaker's 

 stock ; but still he had tried his 'prentice hand at both 

 Bates and Booth before, and never bought or hired 

 from either of them again. His first purchase was Nor- 

 folk (2377), a grand roan bull by Second Ilubback, and 

 then such a favourite of Mr. Bates's, that he sent four 

 heifers from Kiiklevington expressly to be served by 

 him. One of them was " mij best Duchess" 33rd, the 



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