A visit to The Museum of Scottish Country Life was a journey back in time to my first 16 years of life in the 50’s and 60’s. I lived in rural Ayrshire and Lanarkshire and spent my growing up years on farms, where my father was a dairyman. I found myself looking at farm implements now consigned to a museum, that I used to handle, and used to earn pocket money during the summer holidays. I recognised and knew the names of such exotic implements as harrowers, grubbers, reapers and binders, mole-traps, turnip chippers, sheep shearing scissors; and watching a video of milking in the 1950’s – something I used to help my dad with when I was 10, and before I went on the school bus!
The Y shaped scythe was nearly as big as me and I was paid 2/6d (12 and a half pence!) a day to cut down the profusion of thistles in the fields where the dairy herd grazed. The draining spade, with its enormous left hand blade, I used to jump on when I was small and allegedly helping my dad re-cut the draining ditches of the silage fields.
The milking apparatus, complete with four chrome cups lined with Alfa Laval rubber sheaths, a pulsator, a rubber can gasket and a hose for fitting to the vacuum pump – I remember helping to do the milking, pasteurising the milk, sterilising the equipment, mucking the byre and hosing it all down on a daily basis. I could assemble the milking equipment with its complicated network of hoses and fittings with practised ease by the time I was 10.
I was driving a tractor in the fields by age 12, and in the various farms became familiar with several makes of tractor – all of which I saw at the Museum of Scottish Country Life. The David Brown (always called the Davie Broon, first picture above), the Massey Ferguson which was the regular mechanical work-horse, the Nuffield which was a big brute of a thing, and the impressively new Fordson Major, (pictured here) which for a while the farmer didn’t let anyone drive but himself!
You can follow the history of the plough – from single blade drawn by horses, to early tractor drawn triple bladed, all the way through to the modern left foot, right foot, multi-bladed swivel versions. An important family picture shows my dad using the horse drawn plough. I’ve posted it again just as a piece of personal indulgence – and because it captures formative years in the development of my own values, my view of working people and of work, of money and what it costs to make a living by the labour of human hands, and my admiration for the sheer tenacity of those who worked the land when mostly what was available was their own resilience, stamina, and yes, pride in their work. My favourite passage in the Wisdom of Sirach pays tribute to farm labourers like my dad:
He sets his heart on ploughing straight furrows,
and he is careful about fodder for the cattle.
Sirach, ch.38.26
That sums up my dad’s work-ethic – in my best moments I hope something of that pride in doing the routine things well, and doing an honest day’s work is genetically transferable. And I also wonder what an honest day’s work is worth for a man who worked up to 80 hours a week – more than the meagre pay-packet he brought home – always, but always, unopened!
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