In the fifth of our series celebrating commitment and
service to agriculture and the countryside, Jeremy Hunt meets Tom
Drinkall
The sixth generation of the Drinkall family is working at
Catshaw Hall Farm, which looks out across the stunning upland
landscape of the Trough of Bowland in Lancashire.
Tom Drinkall has just celebrated his 80th birthday, and is the
fourth generation of this family, who have spent 180 years on the
same farm. But he reckons it's during his own lifetime that farming
has undergone the biggest change.
"From milking by hand and using horses on the farm we've now got
an industry that's unrecognisable from my childhood days. Some
changes have been for the better, but not all. You can't stop
progress, but you do wonder sometimes where it's all going to end
up," says Tom.
The fell road to Catshaw Hall Farm at Over Wyresdale gives
glimpses of the grandiose mansion of the
Duke of
Westminster, owner of the Abbeystead Estate. He's been the
Drinkall family's landlord since he took over the estate almost 30
years ago, a time that has seen the farm undergo significant
expansion.
"We've come a long way from the 28 cows I can remember milking
in a shippon here as a boy," says Tom, whose grandfather's uncles,
in the early 1800s, had been the first Drinkalls to farm at
Catshaw.
At his 80th birthday party recently in Abbeystead village hall,
over 150 friends and family turned out to celebrate - testament to
Tom's popularity and the respect in which he is held by so
many.
Although Catshaw is a hill farm, it has always relied on dairy
cows for part of its income, both from milk and from the sale of
in-calf heifers. Tom's childhood memories are of cows being milked
in the summer and dried off for the winter. "Some of the milk was
made into butter, but most was made into 50lb blocks of Lancashire
cheese and taken to Lancaster market. But when war was declared in
1939 we switched to selling milk. It was collected in 'kits' and
went to Libby's at Milnthorpe in Cumbria," says Tom, who farms with
his nephew John and John's family - wife Elaine and three boys
Thomas, William and Henry.
Horses were used on the farm until the late 1930s. A tractor was
ordered, but the ship bringing the consignment from the USA was
sunk, as the war had started. It delayed the arrival of the first
tractor until 1940.
Those were days of Dairy Shorthorns at Catshaw Hall Farm, but
the Drinkall family gradually began to use Friesian bulls and were
among the first to try black-and-whites in the early 1930s.
"We were selling heifers at that time to a dealer called Tom
Carr at Chipping near Preston, but he told us he found it difficult
selling the Friesian x Dairy Shorthorns, so we went back to
breeding them pure."
Tom, with his father - also Tom - and his late brother Bill then
tried Friesians again and enjoyed success with the locally bred
Ellel Albert 2nd and the homebred Pennine Rufus. And so the
foundations were laid for the Drinkalls' well-known Pennine
herd.
"Looking back you see how certain decisions made such a big
difference. Pennine Rufus was by Ironside Rufus and out of a cow
from the famous Dalton herd. We'd had a bull calf ordered off this
cow, but it calved a heifer. Then we saw the cow was entered in a
sale at Hexham and we went up to buy it. She was carrying the Rufus
bull when we bought her.
"We eventually sold him to the Milk Marketing Board in the 1950s
and he was widely used and very successful," says Tom who recalls
some of the most enjoyable times of the past spent with local
Friesian breeders would visit each others farms to look over their
cattle and discuss how certain bulls were breeding.
"They were very happy days, but now there seems to be no time to
do these things. The pattern of local farming life has
changed."
But Tom still remembers how excited the family was when they
were able to milk 28 cows in one shippon. "That was quite something
at the time. We could never have imaged we'd now be milking 180
cows on the same farm."
The first Pennine Friesians were registered in 1940. "Feed was
scarce at that time so yields of around 700gal weren't as high as
they could have been."
Selling calved heifers has always been a part of the Drinkall
business and the Pennine herd is greatly respected for the
consistent quality of stock produced over many years.
Tom has been great supporter of the Lancashire Holstein Club
(originally the Lancashire and Adjacent Counties British Friesian
Breeders Club) for over 60 years. And has been a regular supporter
of its sales at Lancaster. He's been its chairman and president and
went on to become president of the Holstein Friesian Society in
1989.
"It was a wonderful experience and a great honour. I thought it
was something that was meant for much more important people than
me," says Tom.
Farming Stalwarts is a monthly series
celebrating men and women who have devoted their working lives to
farming and the countryside