Some boffins in
London want us to cut our consumption of meat and dairy products by a fifth.
They did not consult me before coming up with this arbitrary number that you
and I are to follow. They picked this number, without providing an explanation,
if I wish to contribute to climate change reduction at the start of this third
decade of the century. I doubt they consulted the farmers in Kettlewell and
other small farm owners in villages of the Yorkshire Dales. I shall give them
the benefit of the doubt over consulting with a few farmers in Lakeland.
However, the bright sparks from English Nature and the Committee for Climate
Change (CCC) had already made their minds up before stepping out from the M25;
they want fewer sheep on northern England’s hills and fewer cows in the
valleys. They are like that, these ‘suits’, they don’t listen to what farmers –
with centuries of knowledge accumulated by families managing the land productively
– tell them. These Westminster bureaucrats know only what they want to know, gleaned
from pictures and United Nations scientific journals.
My first enrichment of the local history was in 1974. I was on a stag weekend. The focal point for our carousing was The King’s Head Inn, one of three public houses in the village. A dozen of Nottingham’s finest yeomen required a full weekend of hard drinking to see off the bachelorhood of G.J.B. Minor skirmishes included the rugby tackling of ‘the stag’ on a tarmac road (with resultant black eye and grazed cheek) and a magnificent tumble from a tabletop in the pub by one joyously inebriated fellow who was leading the singing with pint in hand. Had we been more attentive to the local history we might (but on reflection, probably not) have born in mind ‘Awd Platt’, the village smith in the mid 1800s who, like our own G.J.B., was “a man of great sincerity and force of character…full of life’s energy”. John Platt was also a temperance advocate, unlike G.J.B., and many a man attributed his better state in life to John’s advice that ran: “there’s no harm in a’nod glass if a chap wod nubbut stop theear”.
The next time
that Kettlewell connected to my world was a few years later when I first met ‘Whale’.
Readers of my chapter on Crantock
will remember the Beasts of the Jungle (undergraduates of Cambridge University)
visiting a house called Kareena. Whale
was one such beast. That first encounter is memorable. Lunching at my in-laws
(the Dog and Doggess) one day I was told there was another visitor. “Who is
it?”, I asked my wife. “Whale”, she replied. Shortly after there was the deep,
throaty sound of a motorbike in the driveway. We went outside. The largest BMW
bike I have ever seen was being leaned on the wall by a tall man clad from head
to toe in black leather. He pealed his helmet off. I was introduced to a
seventy-year old six foot six giant, without a hair on his head, grinning from
ear to ear. This was Whale, one of the Kareena
visitors, who’s real name was Graham Watson.
Now Graham was a
Yorkshireman. He was one of four generations to manage Lister’s Mill in
Bradford, once the largest silk factory in the world. Graham was a bachelor and
so, without a wife and family to drain his pockets, he invested in farmland
around Kettlewell and further north in Upper Wharfedale.
Let me take
readers back to 1066. Land had been ploughed at Kettlewell for some time by
then. There was a carucate (approximately 170 acres) being farmed by the
Normans holding the estate in this, the year they and William I won the battle
of Hastings. Over the following two hundred years agricultural progress was
made hereabouts and by the time of Edward I Kettlewell was a thriving village
with eight carucates providing employment and food. A local culture was being
embedded in the landscape by hardworking Yorkshiremen, laying down a rewarding
way of life for generations that followed. Wise yet entrepreneurial farmers
passed on to their sons and daughters knowledge of the land and the woods as
well of the habits of the River Wharfe. (Let us remember this when I consider
the village’s future, this day I write when Britain leaves the European Union
and we ‘gain our independence’.)
Of the eight
carucates mentioned above two were held by Elias de Knolles, three by the Abbot
of Coverham and the remainder by the Arches and Percy families - all famous
names over centuries in northern England. The years to the end of the Tudor
period in England featured Kettlewell land being gifted or traded in exchange
for favours, forfeits and debts. Land, along with sheep, was a valuable
commodity upon which family dynasties floundered or thrived. The housing stock
in the village grew slowly. Cottages for the farm workers and the lead mine
workers (from 1658 onwards), as in neighbouring Swaledale,
were small and cramped. Yet the village thrived amidst a landscape providing
rich rewards for the folk that worked hard. By the height of the wool trade
wealthy merchants, spinners, weavers and dyers from the nearby cities of
Bradford and Halifax were acquiring houses around the village. With them they
brought more prosperity and so more employment. Such a person was Clement
Holdsworth who bought Scargill House, a Kettlewell farmhouse, in 1900.
My second visit
to Kettlewell was in June 1989 whilst walking the Dales Way with wife and son.
The route brought us past Scargill House, (of which I knew nothing then other
than it was once part of a notable estate), around the maypole, and uphill past
The Green to lunch at The King’s Head Inn. I remember now there was not a soul
on the street, not a car or a tractor in motion. As we walked up the street, today
still rimmed with ancient cottages - some with visible foundations built in the
twelfth century - there came a familiar voice from a garden. We observed a
house painter up a ladder with his transistor radio on. England was playing Australia
at Leeds in an Ashes Test match and John Arlott’s rich voice was reaching out
to us clearly from the radio. How
quaint. How quintessentially English. We had to match the mood by downing a
pint of two of Yorkshire ale. What could surpass this combination of English delights?
(It was slightly undermined by the news that England was being walloped by
Australia.)
Like Graham
Watson, Clement Holdsworth was a member of a successful West Riding family
dynasty. John Holdsworth & Company of Halifax has made worsted for six
generations. Like Watson, he loved Wharfedale and acquired Scargill House with
surrounding land that he developed into both a family home and an agricultural
estate. His son George continued the family business and it is his three sons who are featured in the
stunning and emotive stained glass windows in St. Mary’s church in the village.
I remember reading about the death of two of these boys in the Second World War
and I was touched and saddened; John, serving with the King’s Royal Rifle
Corps, died in Belgium in 1945;
Michael was in the Fleet Air Arm and was posted
missing on 24th February 1945; Michael’s twin brother Bill completed
the family’s service to all three of Britain’s armed forces and survived the
war as a Flight Lieutenant.
A small English
village, like many others throughout Britain, had lost two young men who would
never add their contribution to both an important, valued business and to a
village that needed their touch. Villages and businesses in mid twentieth
century Britain were left severely depleted by the war of men with talent. Yet Kettlewell
was typical of rural villages and agricultural landscapes; women – many like
the Doggess had served in the land army - came to the fore with ideas and vision.
They too made their marks upon this land. Bill Holdsworth died young in 1969 yet
his widow, Dina, took a significant working interest in John Holdsworth &
Company. Women in the village came into ownership of the farms, the small
businesses and even the cricket field and pavilion.
On my latest
visit to the village I met the modern day human metal of Kettlewell at the
weekly Tuesday coffee morning. Twelve women – some lifelong residents, some
‘incomers’ from as far afield as South Africa – greeted me and welcomed me to
sit with them and talk about what makes Kettlewell the village it is today;
what the threats are; and understanding the challenges on the culture being
continued. Josephine farmed in the village with her husband, and she remembers
Graham Watson well. “He walked into the bunk barn on our farm one day, never
stopped to ask. He was in his shorts! He said he wanted a look round, which he
did; said he owned the land next door. Then he walked off!”
“There used to be
seven farms in the village,” said her friend Maureen. “Now there are only two.
There is only one milk farm near here, up at the (Kilnsey) crag.”
Josephine added:
“In my time the next generation did not want to farm. There’s no money in it.
They want to go and live in the cities.” This is a common cry I have heard in
small villages up and down the country.
I asked about
what they thought of the boffins in London, wanting to change the use of much
upland in northern England, reduce the number of sheep and cattle. Josephine
has a clear memory and strong views of a visit one time. “Experts came here
once. Went up on the moor where every villager exercises his and her right to
put a single sheep out to graze, have been since the 1700s. They said the moor
needed draining to allow tree planting.”
“What happened?”
I asked.
“Well they put
drains in. Of course, the moor dried up, no use to anyone; there was no proper
grazing for the sheep. We told them it was the wrong thing to do but they
didn’t listen. You can’t grow things on the land here. Just good for livestock.”
My talks with the
locals – the latest in a long line of farmers who know this land, know how to
get the best use from it, how to earn a living, how to keep it for future
farmers – proved yet again that so called ‘experts’ from Westminster have
little idea how communities such as this have been the backbone of English
agricultural wealth creation for centuries. Further, prosperous industrialists
such as Clement Holdsworth and William and Graham Watson improved the estates
and houses. (Scargill House has been owned by religious movements since 1959
and continues the valuable practice of offering local employment.)
“People should
cut their meat and diary (sic) consumption by a fifth to help save the planet,
the Government’s environment committe (sic) has said”. So read the BBC website
on 23rd January 2020. (Maybe the BBC should lose the licence fee, cut its programming costs and send
their journalists on a basic spelling course with the proceeds.) Bizarrely, and
in an impossibly coincidental use of numbers by another pillar of the British
establishment, Waitrose supermarkets, a poll taken by them shows, “a fifth of
people are now flexitarians – trying to eat more plant based meals without
ditching meat altogether”.
I am suspicious
about the wanton use of this number ‘fifths’. Like the current, mendacious
President of the USA, these organizations use only numbers that suit them,
ignoring the numbers that tell a different story. (Trump fails to tell us that
under his administration his people have wracked up a national debt of $1.9
trillion.) Whilst telling us to eat less meat and dairy food the CCC should also
tell us the numbers involved in Waitrose’s ‘carbon footprint’ with their import
of the many tons of fresh food: sweet corn from India; peppers, celery,
cucumber, lettuce, tomatoes, spinach and squash from Spain; cherries from
Chile; asparagus from Peru; grapes and limes from Brazil; dates from Israel;
raspberries from South Africa; bananas from St. Lucia; radishes from Senegal;
and strawberries and onions from Egypt. Much
of this produce could be grown in Britain, thereby reducing our reliance on
imported food that is flown in. I shall continue to eat meat, cheese, yoghurt,
parsnips, beetroots, potatoes, mushrooms, cabbages and pears because I like
them and they are good for me. They are also all produced in Britain. If the
government is going to be dictatorial about Brits consuming less meat and dairy
then they should ‘persuade’ them off eating South African raspberries in winter.
Is it worth poisoning the planet for the sake of eating strawberries in
January? The time to eat soft fruit, ‘home-grown’, in Britain is the summer.
An enduring life
for the villagers and landscape of Kettlewell will be assured if we support its
traditional position in the local and national economy, inclusive in an
independent Britain (once again). If the commercial price of its produce is too
high for some supermarket shoppers then subsidies paid by all the people of
Britain will allow the upland farms and farmers of England to thrive. With a
reduction in food imports the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions will reduce*. Kettlewell
and Upper Wharfedale will return to be both a prosperous farming landscape and continue
as a haven for walkers, scarecrows and nature lovers.
________________________________________________
*In a letter to
The Times of London on 25th January 2020, the policy director of the
Sustainable Food Trust writes “taking large areas of [UK] land out of food
production and covering them with mostly coniferous plantations (the only
economically feasible option) would destroy precious ecosystems…” And, “the
recommendation to use additives in cattle feed to reduce methane emissions is
impractical, since most beef cattle in the UK graze on grass and receive no
other feed for much of the year. It is also unnecessary. Research shows that
the short-lived nature of methane in the atmosphere means that emissions of
cattle and sheep are not adding to global warming contrary to popular belief.”
So Josephine is correct. Furthermore, grassy fields, hillsides and mountains capture carbon and pull it down into the soil.
Books:
^ For a
delightful yet scholarly read about the whole of Upper Wharfedale I would
recommend a book by Harry Speight titled: Upper
Wharfedale; being a complete account of the history, antiquities and scenery of
the picturesque valley of the Wharfe, from Otley to Langstrothdale. First
published in London in 1900 by Elliot Stock it was re-published by Smith Settle
of Otley in 1988.
I recommend
visitors in Kettlewell to visit Simon Johnstone (from Chesterfield) who owns and
runs the village store, built in 1877, where he will sell you a terrific little
book: A Walk around Kettlewell; a walk
back in time with pictures, history and tales of the village by Colin Hare (from
the Isle of Skye, resident of Kettlewell for over 23 years.) Then sit and enjoy
a pint in each of The King’s Head Inn, The Bluebell and The Race Horses Hotel.
