On the Land

Written as part of Amy Johnson Crow’s “52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks” challenge. This week’s topic: On the Farm

Mum loved working on the land.  Strange for a city girl, born and bred.  She was 24 when she and Dad, with my brother Ian, and Mum pregnant with me, moved into the tiny village of Dowlish Wake in Somerset, and then on to the slightly larger hamlet of Hewish.  This was dairy farming and apple orchard country, nothing much but farms in either place.  It was war time, and everyone did their bit to help, so Mum spent her days working on the farms, mucking and raking and digging and picking, wherever she was needed, and whenever she could find someone to take care of Ian.  Me she took with me, apparently, to sit or sleep by the edge of whatever field she was working in.  

And when she wasn’t working in the fields, she would be out in the back garden tending the vegetables she and Dad planted and grew with vigor.  

I shared her love of farming country.  Many of my childhood days were spent roaming the farm fields around us, and my memories are filled with hearing folk talk about the weather, the harvest, the milking and the like.  While my family were only observers not full participants in this economy, we would take part in annual haymaking and harvesting, when the Merriott farmers would hire machinery and every able-bodied person would turn out to help.  I learned to ride a horse and milk a cow too, though I was never very good at either.  And I remember the  carthorses – we would occasionally get to ride on one, but they were so big you could only sit there, with your legs splayed as wide as can be.  Collecting eggs, and plucking and cleaning chickens were common chores, though I never actually killed one.  

Then there was a time when we lived at Chitcombe Farm, in Huish Champflower, just off Exmoor.  Mum moved there with my sister and I after leaving Dad (Ian was already in the RAF.)  I was 14, Hazel was 11, and we both adored living there.  Never mind that there was no electricity or running water – oil lamps and a pump served perfectly well.  No indoor toilet either, as I recall, and chamber pots under the bed for nighttime calls.  It was a small hill farm, with cows that wandered home for milking, and a breeding bull.  Mum was a bit shocked at seeing Hazel and I watching over the fence when a cow was brought around for breeding.  But you sure learn the facts of life on a farm.  Running barefoot over the fields, jumping over thistles and cowpats with equal aplomb, and taking up whatever tasks we wre assigned with enthusiasm.  We were heart-broken when Mum moved away and we went off to boarding school.

But when it came to my ancestors, I was disappointed not to find more farmers among them.   John MacNie, (1791-1867) a paternal great great grandfather, had some kind of role on the land but he was not a farmer.  At first I thought he was a manual laborer, for a report written by the estate factor, dated August 6 1833, states that  

John McNey (sp) has given up cutting the drains at the cuts near the bridge on the new road as they are become so hard that he can make little progress and as the drains to protect the mounds are made the others being done just now are not so material.

John was in fact supervising the construction of drainage ditches being built to drain the Carse of Stirling to turn the marshland into farmland.  But he also farmed some hayfields which he rented from the lord of the manor, Sir William Murray Esq. of Touchadam and Polmaise.  But these two facts don’t make him a farmer, and I would dearly love to know just what his status was on the Gartur Estate.

Elizabeth Hamilton (1828-1917), a paternal great grandmother, was the daughter of a farmer, according to her death certificate.  Her father, Robert Hamilton, died when she was 14 years old, and she was already at work as a maid servant.  But her farming background appears ten years later when she was described as a “dairy servant”.  

The only other one I can find is another paternal ancestor,  Thomas Carr (1736-1786), a farmer in Beckjay, Oxfordshire.  But my ancestor son of Thomas was from his second marriage and inherited neither the farm nor the farming way of life.  He moved to the city of Birmingham where he became a druggist and grocer.  

So for Mum and me love of farming and farming country was an acquired not an inherited trait.