The Bluddy Prrofessor!
If after three years you’d passed your final degree exams, you could choose to go on and complete an honour’s year, which I managed to do. As part of the requirement you needed a project, and having spent a lot of time as a Daft Laddie with sheep, that was the subject for me.
Our new Dean at Kings College Ag Department, New Zealander Professor Mac Cooper, was keen to knock the cobwebs off all the old trials at our world recognised research station at Cockle Park, about 20 miles north of Morpeth. It had been running experiments since the 1880s which had benefitted farming world wide and it sure was ‘time for a change’.
Prof added poultry research and pig research to the old beef trials, and sheep became a priority to show what could be done by selective breeding. But this was not possible with the typical local crossbreds of Scot’s Halfbred (Border Leicester x Cheviot) of Mule (Border Leicester x Scottish Blackface or Swaledale). A purebred flock was needed so he went down to the west of England and brought home a flock of Clun Forest ewes and some rams.
Mick Given was the shepherd at Cockle Park and he lived with his mother Eadie, who we all loved, in one of the two joined cottages. Mick had been shepherding up the Coquet so was a real ‘ootbye heord’. So both of us had nee botha with communication. Eadie loved her wee cottage, and more so when the new Kiwi farm manager Matt Sanders got the water put in for her, to save her having to carry water in buckets from a near by well. ‘Eeeeh Av got a tap in the hoose’ she kept telling everybody. Ted Pears the long-serving tractor driver and great Northumbrian lived next door.
Matt was one of quite a few Kiwis who joined the staff at Kings to teach and do research at Cockle Park. I acted as interpreter for both husband and wife who were much loved. I remember explaining to my Kiwi supervisor what a ‘gimmer’ was, and what was an ‘owld yowe’ which could either be an aged sheep or oweld which was one cast on it’s back!
The key time for me to be at Cockle Park working with Mick was sorting the sheep for mating (tupping) and at lambing. We students ate on the ground floor of the tower or bastle, and slept on the second floor, accessed by a well worn spiral stone staircase. The spiral in all these towers was right handed to allow the upstairs defender to use the wider part of the step to wield his sword. Going up after a night at the local pub on the narrow part of the stairs was certainly a challenge where you could end up at the bottom again. From the roof you could almost see into Scotland – ideal to see reivers coming from miles away.
Mick was not happy with these Clun sheep from doon sooth. In fact he hated them. They were good big sheep with fine wool and quiet to manage – not like the wild Cheviots he and his dog were used to. It was the age before easy-to-read plastic eartags so our first job was to paint large numbers on either side and we marked these mothers’ numbers on the lambs. Tags came on the market for later researchers to use on the flock after I had left and the programme carried on by other staff and students.
The lambs were a sort of fawny-brown colour which varied a bit, and I remember asking Mick one day how could I describe this for my honours thesis. His answer was that they were ‘moosy doon – the colour of a pig’s fart in the moonlight’! I didn’t report their colour for some reason!
Mick didn’t like Prof – the Prrrofessor! He must have had some order that got him into a real bad fettle one day, when he stormed off from the lambing field declaring that – ‘the bluddy prrrofessor- he knaas as much aboot sheep as my asshole knaas about shutting snipes’. I didn’t comment!
Life has some interesting turns. I ended up in New Zealand and Prof ended up a true Northumbrian, retiring there and growing prize leeks. I was so delighted to entertain him when he once came back to New Zealand to visit family.