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Saturday, November 14, 2009

Darlingtons - Cheshire Dairy Farmers



My Farming Connections

In the Spring of 1949, my mother Meg married Horace Darlington and we moved to Corner Farm, Wettenhall (located at the end of the short driveway that curves behind Wettenhall Church). Wettenhall is not an especially pretty village. It sits flat on very stiff clay, which makes cropping, and harvesting very difficult. The local opinions were: ‘Wettenhall – ah it is wet an all’ and ‘Wetna – where the crows fly backkards to keep the shit out of their eyes’.

In the June of 1949 I was five years old and I started school in the Autumn at the Calveley County Primary School. I was picked up at the end of the driveway by a very old-style round-ended bus that collected children from all over the lanes of that part of Cheshire. The bus was the entertainment centre for us kids, and it was here that I was exposed to my first pop song – sung by Alma Wilkinson – ‘Put another nickel in the old nickelodeon’.

Looking back, I am struck by the clash at that time between the very traditional character of village life and its very stratified class-system and the first inrush of US culture and values . WW2 had shaken things up and a common saying among the kids (repeated from their parents at homes) was ‘it’s a free country’. It was also an era of slowly widening consumerism and another of the rituals was the challenge ‘What’s the time?’ - Quickly followed by the riposte “Time you had a watch and paid for it’.

The farm and farming society became the complete centre of our family life. The farmhouse is a solid brick building (with the older parts of it perhaps brick veneer over Cheshire ‘black and white’) with eleven rooms. It was pretty scary and cold (though my bedroom became more user-friendly when Horace removed the bats from the eves above). The kitchen with its open Triplex grate fire was the kernel of our existence, particularly in the Winter . The largest bedroom was never occupied and was allocated for storing apples from the orchard on newspaper for the Winter – the source of Meg’s excellent apple pies.

In the early years, in response to national directives about food production, the farm was used to grow wheat (a highly unsuitable use of some of the densest blue clay in Cheshire) and I remember steam engines being used to winch multiple ploughs up and down the fields (at the ‘Townsfields’ part of the farm that was some 2 miles from the house). I also remember threshing from bays of sheaves, using a steam engine-driven stationary threshing machine. H.E. Bates captures some of the atmosphere of this period in his books about rural England in the post-war period (e.g. The Darling Buds of May).

As rural English people are used to, we effectively lived in two countries. The first was cold, grey and sparse. The trees and hedges were bare, the sun shone wanly, and dank drizzle permeated everything. However, even in this period (which it seemed could last for 9 months of the year) there could be sublime periods in January and February of crisp frost, clean snow and bright vast skies.

The other country is the one that expatriates remember so clearly – the glow of late summer evenings across some of the most beautiful and long-settled landscapes, with Beeston Crag in the distance. Sunday drives ‘tootling’ down lanes bordered with oaks and horse chestnut trees passing farms whose histories of ownership could be recounted, together with the triumphs and tragedies of the farming families that owned them. And quiet pints in country pubs near canal locks or village greens, with the midges playing above.

‘Grantchester – ah Grantchester …’ as Rupert Brooke wrote (it could be many an English village on a good day). For the sentimental, The Shropshire Lad is also a good read – and a reminder that it was the village lads who did a lot of the squadding throughout the Empire for King and Country. Old Mister Tickle up the road, who spent most of his life as a railway linesman at Cholmondeston, could tell sterling tales of chasing the Turks in Iraq in WW1.

When we settled on the farm I hopelessly devoted myself to helping Horace and the men on the farm with the work in the open air – with all the enthusiasm and lack of understanding that you could expect from a five-year old. I remember running along beside the tractor during harrowing until I was totally breathless, having been repeatedly warned off sitting on the mudguard of the large back wheels.

I also remember grabbing a piece of toast and being put up on the large cart that was being taken down fields to collect hay – when the back ‘thripper’ (a wooden bracket like a large gate) that held the load together gave way and crashed down on the cart top. Fortunately, as the thripper came down, the heavy wooden lattice found a space for me, leaving me unhurt but devastated by the chaff that had collected on my toast when it was knocked out of my hand.

Not surprisingly, I was warned off ‘helping’ after a few of these incidents and returned very unwillingly to being a ‘mummy’s boy’. However, I remained desperate to integrate into farm life – a quest that became increasingly hypothetical as I was unable to develop the necessary skills (partly due to lack of aptitude) and alternative opportunities arose in more academic fields.

Horace was a model of the sterling English yeoman – very upright and independent but his relationship with Meg was not without its storms as she sought to release the ‘tensions’ of living in, what was then, a remote area (with only weekly Thursday trips to Nantwich and very occasional forays to Chester). Nevertheless, the men in her family celebrated her as a brilliant cook who put a lot of love into her superb signature dishes (steak and kidney pie, apple pie, jam tarts, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, sponge cakes, trifles etc.).

We ate very well in terms of the richness and quantity of the food but modern dieticians would quail at the amounts of suet, dripping, butter, cream and baked cheese that were consumed. Heart problems were endemic in South Cheshire – it was not just the Cheshire Cats that prospered for short lives on the dairy farms.

The farm was very hard work, with around 60 cows tethered in ‘tyings’ in the shippons (cowsheds) during the winter, requiring all the food to be brought in, all the refuse to be taken out, and milking twice per day.

When Horace had the opportunity to rent the farm (he had previously been the manager), he not surprisingly took the 65 acres near the house and rejected Townsfields to cut down on the work – though new labour-saving techniques like yarding during winter with cow kennels, bail milking and self-feed silage were already becoming well-established on neighbouring farms.

With Horace, I inherited another family – the Darlingtons. They were a very old Cheshire farming family, whose gravestones can be found at Broxton and Worleston churchyards

The family farm, Hoolgrave Manor, Church Minshull was a vast, decaying but rather grand place. The shippons were built in a large square enclosing a large round pond or ‘pit’ (the Cheshire dialect term) which had cobbled edges. In the old days, the shippons had been swilled out with water from the pit at the end of each milking. The house was vast and the large kitchen was the focus for most family get-togethers.

There was no electric light and oil lamps were still used. There was always a hunk of very fatty home-cured bacon hanging from the rafters in the kitchen and everyone clustered around the range to keep warm in the winter. Old Herbert Darlington , Horace’s father was a ‘character’ who was (I deduce in retrospect) suffering from a potential alcohol problem, as he could sometimes polish off a bottle of whisky per day. The lady of the house, Sarah (‘Sally’) Darlington [nee Price Kinsey] was a tough old boot who wasn’t I fear very partial to Horace marrying a widow with children, though we became quite fond of each other in spite of everything.

Looking at the Darlingtons in the 1901 Census, we find Herbert (17) farming with his widowed mother Esther Darlington, and 4 brothers John (29); Thomas (22); Fred (20) and Albert (14) at Poole Old Hall, Worleston. Esther (born Acton near Nantwich - she was already a widow when she married Abraham as Esther Foster) was 55 at this time and the household also included her 78 year old mother Ann Scragg and a 35 year old servant Mary Goosey. Herbert was one of at least 10 children and so we can surmise that all the girls had been married off.

By 1901, these Darlingtons had also colonised another nearby farm - Bryanes Hall (now Barons Hall), Aston-juxta-Mondrum , Worleston, where Abraham (33) was farming with his wife Alice D. (33). I assume this Abraham was the eldest of Esther's sons and that he was in the process of recreating the large family that he had known as a boy. This neighbouring family in 1901 comprised John (15), Beatrice D. (14), Edward (11), Abraham (10), Herbert (8), Mary D. (6), and William (3).

Horace also used to speak affectionately of his 'Great Uncle Abraham' who was an inveterate womaniser, and who died in his 80s after falling off his bike into the ditch in Bunbury back-lanes, still wenching after a bit-of-diggly. Asked his secret with women, Uncle Abraham is reputed to have said ‘Ah anna very good looking – but I’m very faskinatin!’

Going back to the 1881 Census, we can confirm that my Darlington great grandfather was yet another Abraham Darlington born c1841 at Willaston, near Nantwich. At the time of the 1881 Census, he was farming with Esther on '108 acres, employing 1 man' at Outlanes, Church Minshull. Herbert's brothers John and Thomas Darlington had already been born. One assumes that Abraham was yet to move up to take the tenancy of the larger farm Poole Old Hall. The 1881 Census records yet another Abraham Darlington, born 1847, Burwardsley, who must have been still living near or at the original family farm at Broxton.

Horace's great great grandfather was John Darlington - and the family is long-linked to this part of South Cheshire.

The Darlington household at Hoolgrave Manor came instantly to mind when I read two novels – ‘Cold Comfort Farm’ and ‘The Mill on the Floss’. [By the sound of it, Poole Old Hall would fit the bill even better!]. There was a kind of craziness about Hoolgrave Manor with its mixture of decaying gentility and physical hardship. In the depths of the cavernous kitchen, one would come across Italian ex-prisoners of war would had stayed on as farm labourers.

Horace’s elder brother George now reminds me of Seth in the novel Cold Comfort Farm. Apparently, both he and Horace were great ‘mollockers in the sukebine’ i.e. womanisers, in their day. George was married to my ‘Auntie Sheila’ (I was always very fond of her – she was a nurse with a wry sense of the ridiculous) – and their children were Christopher and Myra (George farmed at Roughwood Farm, Alsager, Cheshire and the farm is still farmed by his son Chris).

The younger brother Richard (Dick) was still at Hoolgrave when I used to visit – our side of the family fell out with him over the administration of Herbert’s will and so I can’t recall the names of his children. Like George Elliot’s own family (she was born Mary Evans into a Warwickshire farming family), as recounted in the novel Mill on the Floss, Sally made very sparing use of the ‘best’ rooms of the house (I can only recall one gathering in the main lounge) and she hid away most of her precious linens and silks.

Despite Herbert’s drink problem, the Darlingtons were very proud of their place in Cheshire farming society . Old Herbert must have been very stubborn and determined when he was young – when a landlord failed to meet his obligations on the improvements promised for a farm that he was tenanting – obligations to improve the house for Sally – he drove his pony and trap through the garden of the aristocrat’s big house, ruining all the flower displays and borders.

The Darlingtons were also known for their fox hunting prowess and their steeplechase racehorses (when I was young they were breeding from Catherine the Great, a brood mare that was half sister to the Grand National winner Russian Hero). I have very happy memories of walking down the fields in Church Minshull to check / ‘look-up’ the horses in late summer evenings.

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