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Memories of Village Life

Born 30/05/1954 at Prestwick Manor Farm Only child to Bob and Phil Cherriman, Nine years after the end of World War two.
Back then nearly every village was self-sufficient, and I can remember at least 24 shops and trades as well as three pubs.
A cobblers by Swan bridge, Slaughterhouse behind the Swan, Chemist, Miss Manns cycle shop, Manns Garage, Furlongers butchers, Newsagents, Banks x2, Toby jug tea room, Sheens off Licence, Bakers, Post office, Kirby's butchers and briefly fish and chip shop, Butcher Ray Ball, DIV shop then grocers, Smithy, Grocers and another baker and the fire station in Coxcombe lane, and finally at the bottom of Ridgeley Rd. Ridgeley garage and a Haberdashery.
And then there was Steamer Winson and his grey van............. 
1954, One of the last red squirrels seen locally.
Rabbits at plague proportions and myxomatosis just released............ The 1950's was also the end of an era of horsepower.
During the second world war one million horses, largely from farms, were sent abroad and only 62,000 returned.
Tractors were replacing horses before the war but this major loss of horsepower accelerated the process, and when I was born we had no horses and one small grey Ferguson tractor. A pair of horses could plough one acre per day and soon tractors were ploughing ten acres or more a day and now 100 acres a day is possible.
The farm consisted then of Prestwick Manor and Bethwins Farm totaling about 250 acres. The weald clay starts right here and extends through to Kent. The heavy soil Is best suited to growing grass but cattle need to be housed for about six months every winter because it gets so wet. Spring arable crops are not viable as the ground is slow to dry and warm up in the spring.
My father was passionate about British Friesian dairy cows and milked around 120. He showed them and exported them to several different countries. He bred the first cow ever to produce 100 tons of milk in its lifetime. He won best farmed farm in surrey several times and many top awards.

We grew a small amount of arable, but we mostly grew grass to feed the cows. One bumper year we bailed and stacked by hand 30,000 conventional bales of hay.
We were dependent on casual labor in the evenings and weekends for hay and straw carting and many from the village helped us.     
My father was also quite passionate about cider and every autumn we would collect two trailers of waste apples from Kirdford apple growers and with the help of three uncles and some friends turned it into 500 gallons of cider- ranging from delicious to undrinkable!
In 1959 I started school at Watlands on High street green. My first day was fairly traumatic as I don't remember ever seeing many other children, let alone playing with any.
Much of my childhood was spent wandering alone with my dog and playing on the farm. Making camps in the woods or with bales in the barn.
I remember when I was about 6 or 7 walking close to Hazelbridge house and a little girl of my age invited me into her garden to play.
They had a fishpond in a figure of eight shape and I fell in and would have drowned if her mum hadn't fished me out........
In 1963 the common agriculture policy was introduced by Europe. In the early days it focused on supporting agricultural supply and prices and we had the so-called grain and butter mountains and milk lakes in intervention stores. This proved too costly, and support moved more towards direct payments leading to more and more EU control and regulations. Today we have to fill in a form before we can sneeze! The CAP has had mixed results-for example in the early days farmers were encouraged to remove hedges and create bigger fields and later encouraged to plant more hedges again! More about government schemes later.
In the late winter of 1963, I was 9 years old and we were snowed in by 6 foot snowdrifts for two weeks.
The main roads were open and several times a week we towed a toboggan to the village to do our food shopping. When we eventually were able to get out by car we drove towards the coast and the other side of Duncton was like a different world-they were sowing spring crops and the dust was flying with not a trace of any snow.
Chiddingfold bonfire has always featured in the family calendar and there was one year in the 1960's when we didn't have a firework display. They weren't so safety conscious in those days and the fireworks, mostly rockets, were laid out on the grass at the top of the green when a spark from the bonfire ignited them and they all went off and totally destroyed the side of a mini parked there.
I think it was the same decade when we nearly didn't have a bonfire. Two nights before bonfire night someone set fire to it but on the Friday and Saturday we rebuilt it even bigger than the original.

In 1969 I left school aged 15 to work on the farm.
At that time we had taken on more land and we employed six people and had a dairy herd, a beef herd and some arable crops to provide food and bedding for the livestock. The plan was that I would gain practical experience with each department before going to agricultural college, but in 1972 at the age of 41, my father became seriously ill and died the next year with bowel cancer.
I was 19. As you can probably imagine I had to grow up very quickly.
We had some amazing staff who were a great help to me as a young man and one thing I was certain about was that I didn't want to milk cows so within a year of his death we sold the dairy herd and increased the beef herd and arable acreage.
Shortly after my fathers death, I met my now wife Jan and we married in 1975. My parents had been renovating two derelict cottages on Pockford road and after my fathers death we speeded up the project and Little Pockford cottage was our first home.
We married on July 25th and planned to honeymoon in Salcombe.
On our way there I became ill and soon after arriving at our hotel I was diagnosed with meningitis and ambulanced to Plymouth General hospital for two weeks...........
It took me six months to recover.
One year later in 1976 we had a drought and the crops died instead of ripening and harvest was finished before it usually would have started. The land was like a desert and we had to feed hay made to be fed in the winter and buy in feed for the livestock- mostly potatoes.
1976 was also the year we took over Mill House Farm.
My father had bought the farm 7 years earlier and had a gentlemens agreement to allow the vendor Col Price to continue farming for seven years before we took possession. Sadly my father had died three years before he could farm the land. Acquiring this land enabled us to expand our beef herd.
One of the traits I inherited from my father was that he was a worrier - he would literally worry himself sick and I was becoming like that too but In 1982 my wife and I heard the gospel message-we knew the gospel but this time we really heard and responded and one of the many things that changed after that night was that we had a peace that we hadn't known before and I stopped worrying.

On the 16th of Oct 1987 we were still living at Little Pockford and I woke up early in the morning to go to work and said to my wife that it seemed to have been quite a windy night. I went out of the house and got in the Land Rover to drive to the farm and found the one-mile journey blocked by at least 25 oak trees. Yes, it was the morning after the great storm. Our first priority was to clear the road so that we could bring silage down from Mill Farm to feed cattle housed and this took about 5 hours. Our second priority was to check and secure cattle still in the fields - so many fences had been flattened by fallen trees and It was three years later that we finally cleared all our paths and tracks and caught up with fence maintenance.
Over the years we have had several incidents involving livestock, and the following come to mind.
Sheep attack
In the 1970's we used to overwinter sheep brought up from Kent on surplus grass and one-night dogs attacked and killed dozens and injured many more. With the help of the owner of the sheep we kept a 24-hour armed watch over the flock for over a week and nothing happened, the dogs didn't return. Then they were moved to a field in Hambledon about three miles away to stay overnight to be taken back to Kent the next day.
That night they were attacked again right outside the farmer’s house and nothing was heard. The scene was again horrendous, but the dogs were never seen.
Moving cattle along the road.
One day we were moving cattle along Pockford road and a dog rushed up barking in the garden opposite Skinners Lane. This caused the herd to panic, and one jumped onto the bonnet of a waiting car doing considerable damage. I went to apologise and was completely amazed when he simply drove off without saying a word!

The 1980's was also the era of the new age traveller-remember them? We had 10 caravans move onto woodland on the farm where we were tenants and at first although there was clearly drug dealing going on they weren't affecting the farm. It took nearly a year to establish who actually owned the land and I think we all hoped they would soon move on. Then one day a new caravan moved in and immediately we had sheep killed by their dogs. This prompted the landlord to get an eviction order, and the due day arrived and myself farm staff and bailiffs waited from 8.00 am until 11 am for police to arrive. The bailiffs consisted of a very dodgy ex policeman and two ex cons with an ancient low loader lorry. All the caravans were empty, so they attached a chain to the first one to tow it out onto the road and managed to pull the back off their ancient lorry! After that we towed them all out with our tractor and secured the site. The bailiffs charged a substantial fee but we had done all the work!

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Heifer in cesspit.
On another occasion I was showing a potential buyer around a herd of heifers when we heard a strange echoing mooing. We found a heifer had fallen through a dislodged manhole cover into a massive effluent tank belonging to nearby cottages. The pit was almost full, and the heifer only had her head above water. We quickly got a tanker and emptied the effluent and a telehandler to lower me on a rope into the tank. Thankfully the fumes had partially sedated the cow, but I could only spend a few minutes down there before coming up for air. There was only one way out and that was the same way that she had gone in, and I managed to get a rope attached so that she could be lifted out, feet and head first.
Loose cattle
Occasionally we have had cattle escape, and one summers night at about 2.30 in the morning we were driving down Pockford Rd trying to find a herd of cattle that had been reported straying when I noticed steam rising from behind a garden wall. The whole herd was in a garden which I knew contained a glass frame and a greenhouse.
We managed to get them out and secure them in a nearby field and when I went back the next morning dreading what the damage might be I saw that a cow had stepped in and out of the only open part of the glass frame and another had walked in and backed out of the greenhouse causing no damage at all. It took us only minutes to clear up.
Coombe court cattle
In the mid 90's we rented grazing at Coombe Court farm and one year, through an agent, we bought 90 beef cattle to graze through the summer. They were top quality cattle but extremely nervous as soon as they saw anybody. We found out later that they had grazed their first summer on the south downs and the stockman checked them from a vehicle and they seldom saw anyone on foot.
In September we agreed on a sale and with an army of people and vehicles attempted to drive them into a handling yard. As soon as the leading cattle entered the yard they panicked, and all rushed back out crushing the bonnet of the cattle agents car and nearly injuring my youngest son Daniel. I lost a lot of sleep worrying that they might
escape before we could move them and winter was approaching.
I contacted my vet and asked if they could be sedated through food and we started putting out feed for them. Each morning the food was gone, and the cattle were the other side of the farm! We then created a large corral with gates and fed them in there and after about two weeks added the sedative which made no difference at all, as soon as they saw me, they were off. I again contacted the vet and asked for a stronger dose which he supplied and warned me that it was so strong that we might lose some, but we were getting desperate. The next day I added the sedative to the food and watched and waited-it still made no difference at all!
Several days later we managed to catch them feeding in the corral and quickly secure it and call in the lorries to take them away. I can’t tell you how relieved I was - I began to sleep well again! A few days later it started to rain, and it would have been impossible to get lorries across the fields until the spring.
Ever since my father’s time we have welcomed many school visits, some local and some from inner city schools and always found it very rewarding. Often, while waiting for the coaches to arrive I would think, what on earth am I going to talk about for the next three hours, but the time always seems to fly by.
Since 2000 we have had to diversify as farm incomes continued to fall, and it became increasingly difficult to make a living on our acreage. In 2001 my middle son left Agricultural college and came
back to the farm to set up an agricultural contracting business. He I'-' 0 "-" has the machinery to do most things except combine harvesting and baling. In 2005 we converted all the grassland to organic status with the help of EU grants and we now have nearly 1000 organic breeding sheep on the farm.
I touched on government schemes earlier and as well as enabling us to convert to organic grassland they have enabled us to plant miles of new hedges, grow crops to support bird life, establish ponds and coppice woodland. Virtually every farm in the country would struggle to survive without the single farm payment, as it is now known. ", , .
A lot of good has been achieved through the E.U. schemes but they have become increasingly bureaucratic, complex and one size fits all.
 
For example, they recently introduced a rule that farms over a certain size must grow at least three crops whether they are viable or not.
This came about because Germany was growing vast acreages of monoculture maize and to address that problem all E U states had to adopt the new rules even though the issue only applied to Germany.
And what about the future?
Agriculture is currently squeezed between the extra costs associated with high welfare and the prices we receive, and with Brexit looming we are in a state of complete uncertainty.
Michael Gove has made many welcome and interesting comments, but we have no idea yet what the new policy will be. It begins to look like any support will be tied to the environment and results based.
Going forward a number of issues concern me, but I will mention just two.
The first is the increasing disconnect between the public and the natural world. This is not only happening outside our industry but also within. Due to financial pressure and the need to spread costs over ever-increasing acreages, the work on many arable farms is done by contractors who have no connection with the land. They arrive, get the job done as quickly as possible and go home without ever leaving the cab of their GPS controlled machines. The intimate knowledge of the wildlife around them is being lost.
My second concern is with the dramatic decline of farmland birds and the massive increase of predators. Twenty years ago we started seeing the first buzzards and now they are common. In the last five years we have seen the first kites and ravens, and sparrowhawks are increasingly raiding my bird feeders. They are beautiful birds but they all have to feed on something.

To conclude.
One thing I am certain about is that the vanishing traditional practices of mixed livestock and crops produce the most wholesome produce and the most benefits to the environment. We now have the technology to test any product for its nutritional content    and
if farmers were paid based on proven nutritional quality instead of just quantity it could revolutionise the nation’s health and the whole farming industry.

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Written by NR Cherriman 2021