Wheels Rolling at Eight E-Book

Arthur Anderson

• Herausgeber: Grosvenor House Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 510

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Up the creek without a paddle (almost) in Papua New Guinea; a sheep's nose and silver horns in Kabardino-Balkarskaya; dancing with horses on the Hungarian plains; chasing whales in Newfoundland; snooker with a frozen goose; at home with the family linked to the plot to assassinate Hitler and receiving a hair tonic from the Chinese – by mouth. A farmer's son from south-west Scotland, Arthur Anderson began work in 1961 as a copy boy on "The Scotsman" in Edinburgh shortly after leaving school at 16. As he looks back over a working lifetime as a farming journalist and television producer Arthur claims that these trials and tribulations were never even hinted at in his various job interviews.

Leseprobe

Contents

Roots

First Steps in Farming

Edinburgh

A Reporter at Last

A Capital Return

Heading South

BBC Radio Scotland

Lights, Camera, Action

TV Diversity – Landward Style

Gallimaufray

Eastern Approaches

All Work and No Play? – No Fear!

…….and Finally

Copyright

For

Andrea

Acknowledgements

Front cover design courtesy of Graham Lang

Photograph of Uswayford Farm, Northumberland, by kind permission of Tom Pugh Photography

Photograph of Andrea inThe RoyalHospitalfor Sick Children, Edinburghby kind permission of “The Scotsman”, Edinburgh

Photograph of the May Farm courtesy of Rhuna Barr

Photography layout and digitisation by Janusz Ostrowski

The author thanks the small army of BBC staff and freelances who shared his journey and the farming families of Scotland for their kindness and support over the years

Foreword

Wheels Rolling at Eight. There are many well-known phrases in the broadcasting business but that isn’t one of them. It’s special to me – and to the small team of cameraman, sound recordists, reporters and production assistants who spent 25 years following me to every corner of the UK and twenty-seven countries around the world.

Timing is critical in the broadcasting business. If you’re a producer or director, clock-watching becomes an obsession. As you can’t be a little bit pregnant, so you can’t be a little late for a billed broadcast.

The title stems from a slight altercation on location early in my television career when I felt a member of my team had been a little too liberal in his interpretation of what I meant by an 8am scheduled start. I recall emphasising - as forcefully as I dared - that 8am did not mean checking in for breakfast or even having a final cup of coffee to kick-start the day. Nor did it mean a cue to start loading the camera car with the usual myriad collection of metal boxes. What 8am did mean, I gently insisted, was everyone breakfasted, hotel bills paid, cars loaded and – wheels rolling! It was a phrase that was to cling to me over the years.

I’ve heard it said that life is a bit like a toilet roll – the closer you come to the end, the faster it seems to go. For many years, a picture of our four young children playing in the snow has had pride of place on my bedside table. Today they have all grown to adulthood. How quickly the intervening years have passed. What have I missed of their growing up? What don’t they know of their father? Perhaps this book will fill in some of the gaps and help explain why their father very often did not join them for supper.

The late Hollywood film star Cary Grant is alleged to have said that nobody is ever truthful about his own life – there are always ambiguities. George Orwell went further when he said that a man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats. Hugh Cudlipp, the pioneering Fleet Street editor, put it succinctly when he said that most autobiographies share a common blemish – self-glory and self-justification. I’m sure they’re all right. In the same way that childhood summers seemed always warmer and longer than today, other events in your life viewed from a distance can often take on a rosy glow. Nonetheless, what follows is an attempt to put on record an honest account of what has been a hectic but fortunate and fun-filled life.

Roots

November the 21st, 1944 was a Tuesday. It was a cold day with three inches of snow recorded in the Lanarkshire hills. The hit song of the time was the Mills Brothers’ You Always Hurt The One You Love and 4000 tons of bombs were dropped by Allied planes on German oil stores. And one more thing – I came into the world at the Cresswell Maternity Hospital in Dumfries.

But I don’t recall any of that. My earliest memory is climbing a hill. It was a thickly wooded hill deep in the south-west of Scotland and it’s called the Doon of May. As hills go it isn’t big but it played a large part in my early life. As a child, my father Jack and mother Frances would occasionally break off from their farming duties at the May Farm near Port William on the shores of Luce Bay and on a fine Sunday afternoon lead me over the Dam Field, across the boundary wall that separated our tenanted dairy farm from forestry land and up, ever upwards, until we reached the top of the Doon.

No matter how often we made the ascent, the excitement of the journey never grew less in the child breast. Maybe it was the stories my parents told me as we walked – tales of the School in the Wood with Mr Fox the teacher and Mr Squirrel the janitor who used his bushy tail to sweep the floors. They were stories that never palled no matter how often I heard them.

Maybe it was the prospect of a brief picnic of lemonade and a chocolate bar before beginning the descent and return to the farm in time for the afternoon milking. Or perhaps it was the view from the top of the Doon of May, surely one of the finest in Galloway. On a clear day the flat dark moorland stretched for miles eastward beyond the farm steading before being halted in its tracks by the sparkling waters of Wigtown Bay and the blue mass of Cairnsmore of Fleet in the Galloway hills beyond. Turn round to the west and there was Luce Bay and the distant coastlines of the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland in the far distance. Turn yet again and the chance to see the faraway smoke from a steam engine as it approached Kirkcowan railway station on the Stranraer-Dumfries line, all too soon to fall victim to the Beeching Axe, the name given to the wide-ranging cuts to Britain’s nationalised rail system in the 1960s.

But in the summer of 1961 I climbed the Doon of May alone. As I looked out on the familiar scenes, I realised that my life was changing. I was 16 and had left Barnard Castle School in Co Durham with five “O” Levels to my name. There had been talk of my staying on for “A” Levels and then, maybe, to university but even though fees for a boarding school like Barnard Castle were low in those days, they were still a major commitment for a tenant farmer with 29 Ayrshire dairy cows. Going to boarding school in the first place had only proved possible thanks to a small legacy left to my parents in my maternal grandmother’s will. At £65 13s 4d a term (£65.67p), an unbelievable small sum by today’s standards, that legacy just covered my five years at secondary school.

In any event, I was eager to stretch my wings. I wanted to be a journalist - despite some opposition from my English teacher at school. A fellow Scot, he had always been a supportive and enthusiastic teacher but when I confided my newspaper ambitions to him in my last months at school, he clearly felt I had made some kind of pact with the devil and barely spoke to me again. I suppose my wish to enter journalism stemmed from my enthusiasm for the English language espoused by an earlier teacher at Barnard Castle. He was Arnold Snodgrass, a close friend of the poet W.H. Auden during their time together at Oxford University. I guess my commitment to words came from fierce penalties promised by Arnold Snodgrass if we were found guilty of bad spelling, punctuation or grammar. “Boy,” he would roar at the luckless offender of some such transgression, “I will thrash you with rusty barbed wire till the blood drips down your socks.” Such threats tended to concentrate the mind wonderfully.

I was further enthused about a possible life in newspapers when in 1959 I read regular despatches on the progress of the 23-year-old Dalai Lama escaping from Chinese-controlled Tibet through the Himalayas into the safety of India. It was an exciting adventure story writ large and it sowed a seed within me. It never occurred to me that any journalistic beginnings I might aspire to were likely to be a little more mundane.

And so with the support of my parents, the decision had been made. I would leave school, sign up for Skerry’s Commercial College in Edinburgh to learn typing and shorthand and wait to see what the next step might be.

One thing was for sure – despite the strong tradition of sons following in their father’s farming footsteps, my parents believed that the future for their kind of farming was limited and that my best hopes of a career lay beyond slicing turnips for cattle and sheep on bitterly cold winter mornings. Despite my enthusiasm for working on the farm, I could see their point of view. It was a hard life.

Frances, my Galloway-born mother was from farming stock. Her father was Robert Skimming, a successful joiner and wood merchant in the village of Kirkinner near Wigtown– and by all accounts a formidable Scottish athlete in his youth - who had in his later years bought a dairy farm called Airyolland overlooking Port William village on the shores of Luce Bay. Her mother was Jeannie Simpson also from a farming family in the Garlieston area of Wigtownshire.

My father Jack, a Northumbrian lad, was from more distant farming stock. His great grandfather, George Anderson, had been a shepherd in the middle of the 19th Century at Uswayford Farm near the village of Alwinton in the foothills of the Cheviots. He was the father of eight children including five sons who were later to join him as shepherds at Uswayford in the valley of the River Coquet. Changed days. There’s not a single sheep farm in Britain today that could support six shepherds.

Uswayford is no longer a sheep farm on the scale it was in my great great grandfather’s time. Now surrounded by forestry plantations like so much of the uplands of the North of England and Southern Scotland, it remains one of the most remote farms in England but today offers a welcome sign of human habitation to passing long distance walkers trudging the weary miles of the Pennine Way. Stretching 260 miles from the Derbyshire Peak District through the Yorkshire Dales and over Hadrian’s Wall to the Cheviots, the Pennine Way is one of the great long distance walks in the UK and for walkers heading north, Uswayford offers a waymarker before journey’s end at Kirk Yetholm just across the Border into Scotland.

But that link with the land on my father’s side was broken when his father, Andrew Anderson, became an employee at Ratcheugh Whinstone Quarry near Longhoughton village in Northumberland until a variant of miner’s lung disease claimed his life on April 20th, 1906. He was just 40 years old. As a result, Ellen, his schoolteacher widow, was left to bring up four sons – Norman, Edward, Arthur and John – with John, or Jack as he was always known, being my father. How she managed what must have seemed by today’s standards a Herculean task is impossible to fathom. There was some fanciful suggestion that her family who were Forsters had links with a jockey who rode for the Duke of Bedford and went on to run a pub in London’s Drury Lane. Sadly, I have never been able to discover any hard evidence to substantiate a family connection with either the aristocracy or the licensed trade – other than as a customer of the latter.

Times must have been hard for my widowed grandmother and the pressure to achieve independence in her four boys was strong. And so on May 15th, 1920, at the age of 16 my father Jack, the youngest son, began a four-year apprenticeship in the Merchant Navy with the Cairn Line. I have in my possession the linen apprenticeship document he signed which bears on its reverse side, in immaculate copperplate detail, the list of cash withdrawals from his wages over that four-year indenture period. The record notes that his first withdrawal from his wages was £1 13s 9d (£1.69p) on July 29th, 1920 and his final withdrawal was 13s 4d (67p) on May 18th, 1924. During his first year he received £4, in the second it was £8, in the third £16 until the final year of his apprenticeship when he earned the princely sum of £32 – a grand total of £60 for the four years of his training – and the cost of his uniform came out of his own pocket.

Having successfully completed his indenture with the Cairn Line, my father was to go on to earn his Master’s ticket during the next 20 years sailing the oceans of the world before leaving the sea to pursue a second career as a farmer at the end of the Second World War shortly after marrying my mother. He was to exchange one tough life for another – no reflection on my mother.

Over those years he was to travel from one end of the world to the other on a succession of ships, mostly those owned by the Cairn Line based in Newcastle. His ships included the Cairndhu, Cairnross, Cairntorr, Cairnglen and Cairnesk. The one closest to his affections over the years, however, was the 4666-ton Cairnmona on which he served for 28 voyages mostly between the UK and Canada and the United States.

In truth, I guess he was glad to leave the sea at the end. He had begun the war by being torpedoed on October 30th, 1939, by the German submarine U-13 which five days earlier had left its Kriegsmarine base in Kiel in the north of Germany under the command of 30-year-old Kapitänleutnant Karl Daublebsky von Eichhain, a holder of the Iron Cross 1st Class, son of a Rear Admiral and scion of one of Austria’s noble families.

Father’s vessel, his beloved Cairnmona under the command of Master Frederick Wilkinson Fairley, was the last ship in HX-5, a small convoy en route for Leith and Newcastle from Montreal and Halifax, Nova Scotia, with a cargo of wheat, wool, copper, zinc and apples. The torpedo struck just before midnight three miles off Rattray Head north of Aberdeen and the Cairnmona took a direct hit in the engine room. Three firemen – George Barrett (39), Frank Thomas (29) and Richard Lynch (32), all from Leith – perished along with the black cat that had wandered aboard the vessel in Leith a few weeks earlier. When the torpedo struck, the officers and crew had barely enough time to throw on a coat and take to the lifeboats. Within 15 minutes of the explosion, the Cairnmona had sunk to the bottom of the North Sea. After 30 minutes the British drifter HMS River Lossie and its Skipper J.C Spence RNR and the Peterhead lifeboat Julia Park Barry picked up 41 survivors, including my father, First Mate Jack Anderson, and landed them safely at Peterhead. It proved to be one of the first rescues by the Peterhead lifeboat which had only recently been commissioned but over her years of service between June 1939 and January 1969 the Julia Park Barry was launched 162 times and saved 496 lives.

The first evidence the local population of the North-East of Scotland had of the sinking of the Cairnmona was the thousands of pippin apples carried onto the Aberdeenshire beaches by the incoming tide.

News of the sinking reached Germany and in one of his propaganda broadcasts from his studio in Hamburg during the last days of 1939 the Nazi collaborator and broadcaster Lord Haw Haw – later to be hanged for war crimes - jeered: “You had apples for Christmas but you’ll have bombs for New Year.”

On May 31st the following year, U-13 met her nemesis when HMS Weston, a Shoreham-Class sloop commanded by Lt. Cdr. Seymour Charles Tuke RN, put the U-Boat out of action for ever with depth charges eleven miles South-East of Lowestoft on the Suffolk coast. The British vessel rescued the U-13’s 26-strong crew plus some Enigma rotors, an invaluable asset for Allied scientists at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire seeking to break the codes used by the Germans for the encryption and decryption of secret messages.

In the bitter war fought over the cold seas of the North Atlantic, lightning was to strike twice for the Cairnmona’s Master, Frederick Wilkinson Fairley. Back at sea as Master of the Empire Sailor, returning from Canada he was torpedoed by U-518 on November 21st, 1942. Once again he and his crew were rescued, this time by HMCS Minas.

In yet another coincidence, when father’s ship the Cairnmona sank below the grey waters of the North Sea it was a case of history repeating itself from the First World War for on June 15th, 1918, the original Cairnmona en route from Leith to Newcastle was torpedoed with the loss of four firemen.

As for Kapitänleutnant Karl Daublebsky von Eichhain, he was to finish the war as a prisoner of the allies but returned to his native Austria in 1945. He died in the small Austrian town of Pyrawang on the banks of the River Danube on October 8th, 2001. He was 92 years old.

After a short time helping run maritime training courses in South Shields in 1940, my father was to return to sea and become involved in the North Atlantic convoys carrying munitions and food to Murmansk in Northern Russia. A total of 78 convoys sailed to Murmansk taking supplies, including 7000 planes and 5000 tanks, to the Soviet forces. It was a perilous trade and thousands of Allied seamen lost their lives in the freezing conditions and by the time the war ended, the Battle of the Atlantic had claimed the lives of 24,000 men and women of Britain’s merchant marine and fishing fleets. All of them who died with no known grave are remembered today at the Tower Hill Memorial in London.

The Public Records Office at Kew reveals that in June 1953, the British government salvaged much of the copper and zinc lost when the Cairnmona went down. At the time of her sinking in 1939, her cargo of 700 tons of zinc was worth £3525 and the 550 tons of copper worth £19,408. Official records show that 568 tons of zinc worth £41,358 at today’s values and 399 tons of copper worth £104,000 were eventually reclaimed from the deep.

Many years after the war the British government bowed to pressure from veterans of the Arctic convoys and their supporters and agreed to strike a campaign medal for those who had risked or given their lives to brave the U boat packs and carry vital supplies to Murmansk. This was the Arctic Star, a six-pointed bronze medal for those who had served between September 3rd 1939 and May 8th 1945. Suspended by a ribbon with colours representing the services – red for the Merchant Navy and with a central white stripe, edged in black, representing the Arctic. Sadly, despite several letters to the Ministry of Defence and research at the National Records Office at Kew, I was unable to identify the name of any vessel that my father had sailed on in those troubled times. Without that information, there was no medal. I was disappointed – father was long dead but it would have been good to have the medal in the family to represent a tangible link with that significant period of British history. In truth though, had father known about this I suspect that in his own taciturn manner he wouldn’t have cared one way or another. All that mattered was that he had come through that wartime ordeal with his life – and a future as a tenant farmer in Galloway lay ahead.

A combination of German U boats and a North Atlantic winter made it impossible for my mother and father to fix a precise wedding date. She didn’t know where he was and when or even if he would ever return. But in his absence, the wedding invitations were duly sent out with the codicil that the ceremony would take place at an early date. Eventually, however, he did make it back in one piece and Frances and her Captain Jack were married in the village church at Mochrum near the May Farm on Thursday, December 31st, 1942. He was 39; she was 26.

By this time the tenancy of the May Farm had been taken out in my mother’s name while father was part of the maritime war effort. Running a farm is tough work at the best of times but with a daily schedule of 29 cows to milk and a sheep flock to run, it was well nigh impossible to be done by my mother on her own. For that reason father applied to be released from his duties to join his new wife on the farm. The Ministry of Labour refused his request, arguing that as father was in possession of a Master’s Certificate his services were required for the war effort.

His request for release went to appeal and was taken up by the Wigtownshire Agricultural Executive, part of a national network of agencies designed to keep the national farming industry working at maximum efficiency. This time his request for release was accepted and as the excitement of their Hogmanay wedding slipped away with the old year father and mother prepared for their new life together running the May Farm.

Despite forsaking the sea for the land at the end of the war, my father maintained his maritime friendships. One of his closest friends was Bill Livesay who had joined the Merchant Navy in the same year as my father in 1920. After the war, Bill and his wife Margaret would spend holidays at the May Farm, bringing with them from Middlesbrough their young son Michael and their daughter Ruth. In years to come, Michael too would follow a life at sea. But his choice would be the Royal Navy where he was to rise through the ranks to become Director of Naval Warfare during the Falklands conflict in 1982 before ending his career in 1993 as Admiral Sir Michael Livesay, the Second Sea Lord.

First Steps in Farming

Compared with the high-technology agribusiness units that dominate today’s food production industry, it was a very different type of farming that filled my childhood days in the 1940s and 1950s.

The May Farm then extended to just over a thousand acres. This may seem like a large area of land but in reality most of it was low-lying wet and unproductive moor, useful for summering the sheep-stock but for little else.

Some of the history of the farm is contained in Mochrum:The Land and Its People, a scholarly work by John McFadzean who, together with his brother Stewart, was for many years one of our farming neighbours and friends at Airylick Farm.

Earliest records of the May Farm indicate that in 1578 it was part of the estate of Sir John Dunbar although by 1855 ownership had been passed to the Marquis of Bute, scions of whose family have continued to own Mochrum Estate ever since.

John McFadzean’s diligent research reveals that one of the earliest tenants of the May was John Milligan, born in 1808 and who succeeded to the tenancy at the age of 24 on the death of his father who was killed by the kick from a horse.

John Milligan appears to have been a man of physical prowess. He apparently regularly drove sheep to Ayr market some 50 miles away, sleeping on the moor on the way. He then left Ayr immediately after transacting business and walked back without sleep.

He even told of one occasion of mowing hay at the May until two in the afternoon then setting out on foot for Lockerie Lamb Fair, travelling all night. Breakfasting at Dumfries he reached Lockerbie in the forenoon and started his return journey in the same evening with a Mr Biggam of Barr. At Newton Stewart Mr Biggam was apparently overcome with fatigue and remained to rest but Mr Milligan finished back to the May alone having travelled a distance of about 120 miles. Even allowing for a little artistic licence Mr Milligan seems to have been a man of considerable stamina!

More than one hundred years later when my mother and father were tenants, the productive heart of the farm lay in the 200 acres or so of in-bye – better land lying close the farmhouse and farm buildings. This provided the grazing for the farm’s main enterprise – a herd of brown and white Ayrshire cows housed in two byres known as the “wee byre” holding thirteen cows and the “big byre” for the remaining seventeen head. In fact, the larger of the two byres only ever housed sixteen cows; the seventeenth stall at the top of the byre was reserved for our Beef Shorthorn bull, in those days a popular crossing sire used on Ayrshire cows to produce beef from the dairy herds of South-West Scotland.

For more than 25 years, this small dairy herd was the centre of the farming business for my mother and father. Although they employed two full time workers for other farming tasks, milking was strictly a family-only affair. In part at least this was dictated by commercial demands imposed by Nestlé, the buyers of the milk that went for processing to the company’s creamery at Dunragit near Stranraer. The May Farm was one of the most outlying sources of their supply and this meant that the lorry picked up our milk before any other farm, arriving each morning shortly after 6am.

To ensure the cows had been milked and their liquid contribution to the health of the nation was cooled and decanted into 10-gallon butts in time for the arrival of Geordie Graham, the driver of the milk lorry, meant that my parents had to rise each morning shortly after 3am.

In truth, there was little likelihood that they would ever sleep in and be late for the arrival of the milk lorry. A wake-up call invariably came from my maternal grandmother Jeannie Skimming. A large stern woman who dressed in black from head to toe, she slept in the room directly below my mother and father. Beside her bed she kept a thick walking stick and she would bang loudly on the ceiling to ensure my mother and father’s wakefulness. Years later, I was to learn that on occasions when my mother and father retired for the night unusually early, any nocturnal bedroom noises that ensued - other than snoring - was met by another bout of furious banging on the ceiling. She couldn’t have heard everything - I must have been conceived somehow.

But seven days drudgery each week for little tangible reward for my parents was far from my thoughts as a boy as I witnessed the twice-daily spectacle of the cows being milked. In winter especially I found the byres to be a warm and welcoming place to be – insulated from the cold and darkness outside by the body heat of the cows and the comfortable and familiar noise of the automatic milking machines pulsating gently in the dimly-lit buildings.

As I grew older, part of my daily winter task was to slice turnips for what my mother and father described as the “big bellies”. This involved filling barrow-loads of turnips, often frozen to each other despite their insulating blanket of straw. The turnips were then decanted into a slicing machine that, long before the days of electrical power, was operated by hand like a giant mangle with the resulting bite-sized chunks taken to each cow in a wire basket. While the vigorous turning of the handle on the machine might have maintained upper body heat it did nothing to increase the flow of blood into my young hands.

To compensate, I used to look forward to feeding some of the more docile cows because I knew that, having fed them, I could pause before I left their stall and slip my hands between their udder and thigh which after a couple of minutes restored enough warmth to allow me to resume my feeding duties. If one or two of the cows looked around in some surprise when they felt two cold little hands on their warm udder who could blame them.

If milking proved a serious business for my father and mother there were occasional moments of humour that lightened the daily round and provided anecdotal material for years to come.

As a young girl my mother had grown up with her brother Peter and sisters Jean and Mary on the nearby dairy farm of Airyolland overlooking Luce Bay and had learned to milk cows almost as soon as she could walk. Consequently she was an expert at ensuring the flow of milk from each cow’s teat by hand immediately prior to placing on the udder the automatic milking machine whose pulsating beat would reverberate round the byre. Not only was she expert at the task of squeezing the cows’ teats to begin the milk flow but on many occasions, hidden from my view by the cow’s flank, could accurately redirect a fine jet of warm creamy milk twenty or thirty feet down the byre to score a direct hit on an unsuspecting but soon to be startled little boy.

At times, it paid too to be aware of the cow’s digestive system. This was especially true at spring when the cows were released from their winter quarters to enjoy the first flush of young grass. One afternoon a commercial traveller walked through the byre in an attempt to interest my mother and father in his latest agricultural product. If his smart suit, shirt and tie were singularly at odds with the working environment he found himself in, they proved even more so a few seconds later when he happened to pause behind one old cow at the precise moment she decided to combine a major bodily function with a vigorous cough and instantly enveloped him in a fine blizzard of bright green diarrhoea.

In today’s high-tech and computerised farming world, dairy cows are identified by freeze-branding with transponders around their necks automatically ensuring they are given precise amounts of feed to match their milk yield when entering their chosen cubicle.

Things were a little more personal half a century ago at the May Farm where the Ayrshire cows entered their own stall. Be it Katie, Hilary, Monica, Muriel, Helen, Frances, Jean or Mary, each one was clearly identified with their names strikingly painted on the concrete wall in front of their feeding trough in bold red - emblazoned identities which were to last down the decades and a testimony to the artistic talent of a prisoner of war called Capperalli.

Capperalli was a young Italian solder who was incarcerated at the Holm Park prison camp at nearby Newton Stewart and was but one of 157,000 Italians and 402,000 German prisoners in the UK spread between 1500 camps from Cornwall to Orkney. Like many of his countrymen, Capperalli found the boredom of imprisonment was made more bearable by day release work on local farms. Painting cows’ names on a small Galloway byre must have seemed like a heavenly release from the horrors of the global conflict that had destroyed so many millions of lives.

That Capperalli should choose my mother’s name of Frances for one of the cows was understandable as were the names Jean and Mary, my mother’s two elder sisters. Muriel and Helen were self-evident too – both fine young girls who were my father’s nieces, the daughters of his eldest brother Norman. Settling on Monica, Katie and Hilary was more puzzling. Monica was to become my young sister but she didn’t make her appearance in the world until years after Capperalli had worked his artistic magic with his paintbrush while Katie and Hilary were a generation later to become Monica’s two daughters, my nieces, and who weren’t even born in my father’s lifetime – and more than likely not in Capperalli’s lifetime either.

Whether prescient or just lucky with his choice of names of some girls not yet born, Capperalli was by all accounts a kind and personable young man who had an affinity for animals. Not only did he leave his legacy for generations to come by painting the names of the dairy cows on their stalls, he also made his mark by bonding with auntie Jean’s dog Belle.

Despite her rural roots, auntie Jean, my mother’s eldest sister, had forsaken her Galloway background when she married Bobby Bicketts, a local farmer’s son from the village of Elrig. Together they had gone to London to forge a career in the Scotch drapery trade only for Bobby to fall victim to cancer in his 30s. Instead of returning to Scotland, however, my auntie Jean continued to carry on the small business that was concentrated in the East End of London.

As the years rolled on she and her dog Belle would make an annual pilgrimage to her childhood haunts in Galloway and stay with my mother and father at the May Farm. However, by now she was so inured to the buzz of London that it used to take her several days at the farm before she could get to sleep at night – too quiet, she used to reckon.

Even during the height of the London Blitz, Auntie Jean continued her small business but maintained her practice of an annual break on the farm. It was on one of these visits at the end of the war with Belle, a gentle yellow Labrador-type mutt with a few question marks over its lineage, that the dog and the young Italian struck up a bond.

In a short period they had become inseparable and when the time came for auntie Jean and her beloved Belle to return to London and once more endure the privations of the war-torn city, Capperalli was inconsolable. As a final act of farewell, he took from around his neck a chain supporting a small Italian military medal and hung it around the neck of the dog.

History does not relate whether auntie Jean ever had to explain to the authorities how her dog came by a military medal from a member of the enemy forces but years later when I visited my aunt and an ageing Belle in London’s Forest Gate the Italian medal still hung from the dog’s neck.

Through the passing years I have often wondered what happened to Capperalli. Did he return safely to the land of his birth and enjoy a full life under a warm Italian sun. Despite my best endeavours I never found out. The Imperial War Museum in London does not hold any official documentation or listings of enemy Prisoners of War although it can offer plenty of advice on where to trace British and allied PoWs. The main source for information on enemy prisoners is held by the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva but even the efficiency of the Swiss failed to provide me with any information on what might have become of that artistic and kindly young Italian who left his mark on the cow stalls in the byres of the May Farm.

His personal war story remains incomplete and is likely to remain so. Despite my research at local, national and international level how Capperalli found his way to Scotland is not known. The best guess is that he was one of the 115,000 Italian soldiers taken prisoner in Operation Compass, the first major Allied military operation of the Western Desert Campaign when British and Commonwealth armies overwhelmed nine Italian divisions in western Egypt and eastern Libya from December 1940 to February 1941.

Despite her farming upbringing, auntie Jean increasingly seemed more at ease in the city than the countryside. On one of her holidays on the farm, she was called on to help during a difficult calving. Where my mother and father happened to be on this occasion is lost in the mists of time but the man in charge of proceedings was the farm shepherd, Bob Jardine.

The heifer was clearly in some distress although the calf appeared to be presenting properly with two small hooves protruding. As was normal in those days, binder twine was always readily available so clove hitches were tied above the calf’s front hooves to allow a better grip by the human helpers.

Bob wound one piece of twine around his strong right hand while auntie Jean took the other. Each time the heifer heaved Bob took the strain – to no effect. Looking round he noticed auntie Jean had averted her eyes from the imminent birth in front of her and was pulling gently but intermittently and ineffectually while she stared steadfastly at her own feet, clearly unable to face the struggle for new life in front of her. Clearly urban life had erased some of her rural sensibilities.

This went on for some time with little progress being made until Bob lost his customary dignified restraint and shouted:

For God’s sake wumman – dinnae pull till she pushes!

A healthy calf was delivered a short time later.

Away from helping with emergency deliveries in the dairy herd, Bob Jardine’s main task was as shepherd, a role he accomplished with great skill and dedication over many years. Like many countrymen of his generation, he was taciturn but never sullen, friendly but never conversational. His day began early, particularly at lambing time, and before daylight had broken his arrival on duty could be determined by the gentle putt-putt of his auto-cycle as he rode into the courtyard of the farm buildings.

Bob had two distinguishing characteristics – his tuneless whistle and his tackety boots. His boots were of a type traditionally worn by farm labourers with upturned toes and serried rows of tackets which, when he walked along a hard surface, could convey the impression of an army of tap dancers advancing in perfect unison. And while he walked over the many miles of fields and moor, he whistled. Or rather, he believed he was whistling. He whistled as he breathed in and he whistled as he breathed out. Whether he thought he was giving vent to some popular tune remains unknown; in reality it conveyed the sense of a desperate breathlessness punctuated only occasionally by a brief snatch of what passed for a chill winter wind finding its way through a broken window pane.

At heart, he was a conscientious and able shepherd able to handle any given situation in all weathers. Not surprisingly, he was busiest during the main lambing season in April when his days began early and finished late. As a small boy I recall waking one beautiful spring morning and looking out of my bedroom window to the fields and the distant Galloway Hills. There in the bottom field walking towards the farm was Bob with a weakly lamb cradled gently in one arm and Nell his collie dog at his heels. I dressed in seconds and raced out of the house and down the road to meet him.

Good morning Bob, I ventured.

He looked down at me disdainfully but with a twinkle in his eye.

Aye, he said, When it was morning.

He took his pocket watch from his waistcoat and showed it to me. It was just after 7am. He’d been up for hours.

Years later when Bob Jardine had retired and I entered my teenage years I took an increasing involvement in the lambing and did my best to help mother and father in what was the busiest and most intensive time of their farming year. In those distant days part of our tenancy included what we called the “back hills” which lay about one and a half miles distant from the May and close by Drumwalt Castle, the home of our landlord Lord David Crichton Stuart. To get to and from these distant parts of the farm involved cycling and with one of our collie dogs panting in our wake we would follow the narrow tarmac road past the calm waters of Mochrum Loch with its catkins galore and the scent of spring in the air. In such rural beauty it was easy to forget the cruelty of nature because it was this same loch that took the lives of two youngsters – one of them the son of a previous tenant at the May Farm – who perished when they fell through the ice while playing on their way to Culshabbin School on December 9th, 1909. The first to fall through the ice was Alexander Chesney, aged 14, and it was in the act of rescuing him with a rope that John Milligan Mactier, son of the May Farm tenant, was also drawn into the icy water.

Those spring days have lived long in my memory. Not only cycling with my father to check the lambing ewes on the back hills and then back to the farm for breakfast before continuing the shepherds’ watch in our inbye fields but also more relaxed cycling expeditions. On many week-end mornings I would cycle to collect our newspaper from the wife of the local blacksmith at the Loch Head near Elrig village. After collecting the paper I would briefly delay my return to the farm by watching Tommy Thomson, the blacksmith, hammer horse shoes into shape – a giant Clydesdale beside him standing calm and motionless despite the noise of the hammer and the roar of the forge fire. All this was years before I had been introduced to the poem The Village Blacksmith but despite the absence of a spreading chestnut tree, reading Longfellow’s verses in the years since reminds me of Tommy Thomson.

Then came the leisurely cycle homewards along hedges full of white hawthorn blossom and past the newly sown fields alive with ground-nesting birds; the peewits putting on their mesmerising aerobatic displays in defence of eggs or newly-hatched young while in the surrounding moorland the curlews, or whaups as we called them in Galloway, reprised their mournful cries as they landed to be hidden from sight among the gently waving acres of cotton grass.

And then it was back to work in the lambing fields. It is a feature of any lambing season in any part of the country that there will be orphan lambs. These are invariably the result of a young ewe getting such a shock at giving birth that her natural maternal instincts are put on hold or a ewe having two lambs and walking away with the stronger of the pair at her side leaving the weaker lamb to await help from a conscientious shepherd or a speedy despatch from a passing fox.

To those outside the farming industry the idea of rearing pet lambs may seem to hold a certain rustic attractiveness. If you’re involved at the sharp end of farming, however, orphan lambs are always more trouble than they’re worth. With luck and good timing they can be twinned onto other ewes that have lost their own lambs but often that luck is absent and for many weeks farmers and shepherds are committed to a bottle-feeding regime. And no matter how conscientiously orphan lambs are bottle-fed, they seldom grow and develop as well as lambs reared with their natural mothers. Instead, the usual end result is a motley collection of bleating pot-bellied creatures that from April to autumn slavishly pursue any human being they think might be concealing a bottle of milk with all the zeal of rats pursuing the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

For all that, every lamb that wasn’t born dead represented potential income and no efforts were spared to try and rear as many lambs for the autumn sales as possible. And that included the Tommy Noddies. When I asked my father what a Tommy Noddy was, he simply explained: Tommy Noddy – all head and no body.

Of course, it was an exaggeration. What he was describing was what was most usually referred to as a “hung lamb” – a lamb that was not properly presented at the point of birth; instead of nose and two small hooves showing beneath the ewe’s tail, there would be only a nose. Usually this presented no major problems when caught in time but if a ewe attempted to give birth in the night when no shepherd was around what could happen was that the lamb’s head emerged then nothing else with the result that growing pressure around the lamb’s neck made the head swell alarmingly. Even then, prompt action would save the lamb; without prompt action the lamb would die – and occasionally the ewe as well.

During the lambing season, a farmhouse kitchen often becomes the nerve centre for the halt and the lame. Weakly lambs left without mothers or exposed to spring blizzards can quickly succumb but even those on the apparent point of death can respond remarkably quickly when they exchange the worst that mother nature can throw at them for the warmth of a cardboard shoebox in the bottom oven of a farmhouse kitchen cooker.

But this emergency procedure can present traps for the unwary. For some years as a youngster I bred Aylesbury ducks. White of feather and gregarious of nature they were my pride and joy although when numbers began to exceed twenty my father took a different view as they increasingly developed the same habits as the orphan lambs when they suspected a passing human might conceal some food about their person.

After one hatching my mother and I noticed that two of the ducklings were very weak and lacked the robust qualities of their siblings. As in time-honoured fashion with weakly lambs, the two tiny yellow ducklings - the white feathers came with maturity - were immediately brought inside, placed in a small tin biscuit box with a duster as a snug bed and gently inserted into the warm embrace of the bottom oven.

To this day we don’t know what happened next. It may have been a telephone call, the arrival of a visitor’s car or the distraction of some report on the wireless. In any event, the door of the bottom oven was accidentally closed – and nobody noticed. In the best tradition of out of sight out of mind, the ducklings passed from our consciousness until, two days later, they were discovered – cooked to a crisp. Duck breeding immediately began to lose its attraction.

Although our farm was primarily a livestock unit, each year my father and mother grew a few fields of oats and while the dairy cows and the sheep proved an abiding interest for me, the cycle of seedtime and harvest also held undoubted attractions.

As the bluebells, primrose and hawthorn blossom of spring gave way to a profusion of red campion along the hedgerows of Galloway it was a sign that one part of the farming cycle was over and another, the annual harvest, was in prospect. And when the green oats finally turned golden at the end of summer it was a time of frenzied activity at which a youngster like me had little constructive part to play. Yet when I was around eleven or twelve years old I felt I had taken one giant step towards become a responsible adult when my father asked me to sit on the binder and handle the controls. This was at a time when only the biggest and most sophisticated farms – and the better-off farmers – could lay claim to a combine harvester. For most, like my father, a simple binder was the order of the day.

The first binders were horse drawn but ours was the next step along the road to what seemed to be technical perfection. It was driven by horsepower of a different sort - the ubiquitous small grey “Fergie”. Developed by Ulsterman Harry Ferguson, the son of a dairy farmer, the seed of his idea for the Ferguson tractor was sown during the First World War when there was a demand to boost food production with the consequent pressure to move from horsepower to tractors. His invention went into mass production in 1936 and the key to its worldwide success was its three-point linkage that enabled it to handle a variety of farming implements. Within a few short years it was a familiar sight on farms from Scandinavia to Africa.

At harvest time, sitting on the binder and operating the controls was a little like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time. Synchronisation was all. Or so it seemed to me with all my attention given over to ensuring one lever controlling the flails to draw the crop of oats towards the cutter bar harmonised with the other lever which controlled the level and the height of the cutter bar itself. At the same time it was important to keep an eye on the binder twine holder – forgetting to stop the tractor to refill the twine holder was a major sin in my father’s eyes when the consequence of missing the end of a roll of twine saw loose un-knotted sheaves thrown out by the buncher to be painstakingly gathered up by hand and brought back to be laid on the straw table of the binder.

Failing to keep my eye on the binder twine holder was not the first time I found myself on the receiving end of a fierce verbal assault by my father – what the family called a good guldering. It was not to be the last.

The golden days of summer harvests as a boy were in sharp contrast to the advent of the modern leviathan combine harvesters that today can achieve in one pass that which used to take months for a previous generation.

After the binder had done its work and thrown the sheaves – hopefully all properly tied and knotted – to the ground, came the stooking when every available and able-bodied man or woman or child was called on to pick up the single sheaves and built them into upright groups for drying. These small groups of sheaves were called stooks and old photographs of country life invariably show stooks formed from eight sheaves. In our part of Galloway, however, stooks were formed from only six sheaves - presumably in the belief that in a high rainfall area like ours the fewer the number of sheaves in the stook the faster the oats would dry.

Stooking could be an enjoyable experience if the sun was on your back or sheer hell if the rain was falling in sheets, a purgatory made even worse if the section you were stooking was full of thistles which could see the day’s work end with tiny prickles embedded from finger-tip to elbow.

After a week – or several weeks depending on the weather – the stooks were considered sufficiently dry for the leading-in to begin. Once again it was all hands on deck with tractor and trailer slowly travelling up and down the field while two workers with pitchforks would toss the sheaves into the trailer where they were painstakingly built into seemingly top-heavy loads ready for transport to the stack-yard at the farm steading. With special rails at the front and end of the trailer to increase the number of sheaves that could be carried, the load often seemed to reach dizzying heights – particularly if you were on top of the load – and more than once even a gentle undulation would see a full load slip off the trailer and create another perfect opportunity for a major guldering from father.

Building the stacks was an art form. Whether they were round or the larger rectangular type known as sow stacks they were built with care and pride by men who had been undertaking this task all their working lives. Starting with a base of stones to insulate the first layers of sheaves from the bare earth the stacks slowly took shape until they were finally topped with a sloping roof-like finish resembling a selection of giant loaves.

Depending on the weather, the stacks would be built between August and September and to protect their comparatively valuable contents from the elements the top of each stack was carefully covered with a thick layer of rashes cut earlier by scythe from a wet area of the farm where rashes could always be depended on to grow in abundance.

The covering of rashes over the grain was then securely pinned to the stack by an intricate latticework of sisal ropes the trailing ends of which were left dangling down the face of the stack and weighted down with small rocks.

If time and inclination permitted – and the second was invariably predetermined by the first – a corn dolly designed to ward off birds and evil spirits topped the stack, a tradition going back generations.

The May will live forever in the affections of our family but it was a hard farm to work with its small acreage of thin and stony inbye land that offered little depth of topsoil for crop production. If we could have harvested stones for a profit the family would have been as rich as Croesus. Being tenant farmers didn’t help either because that meant we had no collateral to help negotiate bank loans.

As it was the farm relied on the monthly milk cheque from our 29 dairy cows and the income from one or two annual lamb sales. Although I was too young to appreciate the struggle my mother and father had to make a living, their financial position could have been little other than precarious. In fact, I remember my father relishing the prospect of an approaching Sunday. Not that he was religious and looking forward to a visit to church but because Sunday meant no Post Office delivery and therefore no letters requesting payment from the bank or various farm suppliers.

One of the highlights of the farming year for a youngster was “mill day” – a day of noise, colour, dust, laughter and frenetic activity. Our nearest contractors were the Wright Brothers, local dairy farmers and contractors who would travel the small roads of our corner of Galloway with what appeared like a kind of magical travelling circus – a caravan of high technology of the age preceded by a giant green Field Marshal tractor pulling a Ransomes threshing mill. In its wake came a straw baler and, occasionally, a large vehicle like a railway guard’s van or caboose that offered overnight accommodation and basic cooking facilities for the contractors if their duties took them far from home.

Once the machines were placed in position beside the stacks to be threshed, the Field Marshall would be turned round to face the threshing mill and a broad canvas belt connected to the mill would be placed on a flywheel on the tractor. Once in motion this provided the power required and the rest of the day was given over to the job in hand.

The day of the travelling threshing mill was a time of incessant noise with shouted conversations between workers trying to compete with roaring machinery and with exposed flywheels and belts that would make today’s health and safety specialists either roll their eyes in despair or seek alternative employment.

From breakfast to dusk the mill threshed the golden sheaves of that autumn’s harvest with 168lb bags of oats manhandled and carried up the steep granite stairs to the grain loft – all of this long before the days of forklift trucks. Little wonder that many farm workers of that generation ended their days with a pronounced stoop and bad knees.

Lunch represented the one break in the day for the mill workers. By tradition this was made and served by the farmer’s wife – my mother. A fine cook at any time, she excelled herself on mill day – not so much on quality as on quantity. With a rag tag army of up to twenty workers and hangers-on to feed, she invariably fell back on tried and tested vote winners like leek and potato soup followed by mince and potatoes with apple crumble and custard to complete the mid-day energy boost. Within less than an hour, the mill workers rose from the table and resumed their stations at the threshing mill. How they were able to work having consumed the amount of food they had seemed to defy the law of natural physics.

Whether by design or coincidence, an occasional visitor during mill day lunches was Galloway’s resident tramp, Snib Scott. How he came by his name is unknown but while no doubt benign in character, his long dark coat, great grey beard and shuffling gait used to strike fear into the hearts of local youngsters.

Snib Scott’s questionable reputation was given further impetus by the fact that he was reputed to live in a cave on the Ayrshire coast near Ballantrae which it was said had once been inhabited by Sawney Bean, allegedly the last-known cannibal in Britain who used to waylay unwary travellers. After robbing them he and his family of brigands then killed and ate them.

While there was no suggestion of any direct link between Snib Scott and Sawney Bean, nonetheless the very threat to a recalcitrant youngster that Snib might get them was enough to strike terror into the child breast.

His reputation to adults was more prosaic – he seemed to have an uncanny knack of knowing when and where the travelling mill was going about its business and he made it his business for the two to coincide, especially at lunchtime. While he may have shared a hunger with the mill workers, there was one quality they did not have in common – Snib would not work.

One tale concerns the arrival of Snib begging for food at the farmhouse door just before the mill workers broke for lunch. The young farmer said he would give Snib lunch - but only if he was prepared to work.

The vagrant considered the prospect and said he would indeed work but could not possibly consider any physical effort while his stomach was empty. Consequently the farmer invited him in and fed him the same generous three-course meal destined for the mill workers.

Eventually Snib rose from his feast and made to leave only for the young farmer to protest that he had promised to work. The tramp looked him in the eye and said simply:

Sorry – I canna work when I’m empty and I canna work when I’m full.

With that, he put his pack on his back and walked down the farm road.

Who Snib was and how he became a vagrant is unknown. It is thought that his real name was Henry Ewing Torbet, a banker who had fallen on hard times.

Fearsome he may have appeared to children but someone must have had a soft spot in their heart for him because a memorial cairn to him stands on the Ayrshire coast near the cave he is reputed to have called home for many years. This memorial to Snib, describing him as “Respected and Independent”, records the bald fact that he was born in 1912 and died in 1983.

If Snib Scott made occasional appearances seeking food on mill days, the annual threshing could be guaranteed to produce a frisson of excitement of a quite different sort.

As the sheaves from each straw stack were forked into the great maw of the threshing machine, the level of the stack naturally fell. And as it fell it was also the signal for the rats and mice that had made the stack their home to descend to a lower level and seek shelter from the noise and disturbance above their heads.

As the stack level fell, so too did anticipation rise of things to come for men and dogs. Every available collie dog or terrier and farm worker or spare mill hand holding shovels would wait as the last rows of sheaves were forked into the mill then leap into action as the rats and mice, now with nowhere else to descend to, made a desperate bid for sanctuary. They seldom found it. In these situations a dog is faster than a man wielding the back of a shovel and with this pattern repeated each time a stack was completed mill days would sound the death knell for dozens of rodents.