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PRIME MOVERS II

It was not my intention to follow up Prime Movers I but the recent TV programme ‘In the Country’ triggered off my thoughts again about the horse and especially about the other side of the story to that offered by Angela Rippon and her team. If horses have to be used then the French breed shown seems to be just the job and, providing it can do the work it should, because of its clean legs, be ideal on the heavy soils of the country.

But not for me! £1,500 for a horse! Ye Gods! Give me a tractor any day. It lasts longer and can be kept in repair for most of its life but Horses! A dose of colic when there’s a field of hay to be turned and the damn thing lies down in the shafts and bends one of them and its got to go to the blacksmiths to be straightened. Or after the weekend and little or no work. Enter the stable to find a hind leg the same size all the way up from the hoof to the haunch. Two days to get over that and it’s nearly the weekend again! Then there was grease. Try turning a pair of trace horses when one of them has that stinking malady. A slight touch of the chain to the affected leg and off the horse went, stamping, snorting and generally making a fuss till it ended up with the trace wrapped around its leg and you took your life in your hands trying to sort that lot out, especially if the other horse was a young one. The old horse doctors used to heat a spade until it was red hot and shave the mattery flesh from the leg. Perhaps antibiotics will have eliminated that cruel operation by now. It was well named Itchy Leg.

Then there were the mares in season, nappy as hell, they would bite the arse of your trousers as you tightened the breeching strap. Some horses would bite you for the sheer hell of it and it was a work of art to get the bridle on with a fitted muzzle. If they didn’t bite they would kick or, in a loose box when the opportunity rose, they’d jam you in the corner with their massive hindquarters and more than one rib cage has been shattered like that.

I would rather have a puncture than a cast shoe. I remember Tidy, a massive Shire, she took nineteen inches of iron for a shoe. I rode her, my legs splayed across her wide flat back for three miles to the lane to the Blacksmiths shop where we met a lorry which had been delivering iron. We had walked all the way as was the custom with the heavy horses, but Tidy didn’t like the lorry and we were back at the farm in a trifle time without the shoes.

Despite the foregoing which I see only as disadvantages the ‘men who drove horses’ lived for their charges, spending unpaid time with them when they were sick and stealing extra food from the granary when the boss had gone to market and left the door unlocked. Four bushels per week of bruised oats was considered sufficient for a week’s work but the carters didn’t agree. Because ‘driving horses’ entailed a seven day week - they can’t be switched off like a tractor - the men were paid two shillings (ten pence) per week above the average wage which was one pound (1936).

It is true that I have nostalgic memories but time gilds the events. It was quite an occasion when Tidy was stung on the rump by a hornet whilst turning hay. Mr. Listers machine was never intended to travel at that speed!

The harness maker who came once a year worked from daylight till dark mending the breakages of the previous twelve months and sleeping in the loft above the horses until the job was finished. The sweet smell of the stable, the rattle of the head stall chains, the sour smell of the West of England Sacks used, one as an apron and the other as a cape to keep the men dry for a day’s ploughing in the rain, the horses names Captain, Bonnie, Bounce, Lancer, the old brood mare Blossom who foaled every year, all these are of the past, and I can only say thank goodness.

So to the annual visit to the district of the Society Stallion, a massive horse indeed, whose groom seemed to risk his life at every service by getting between his charge and the prancing, screaming mare, in order to render help to a sire that had spent many weeks doing the rounds and, at that time of the season, needed all the help he could get! The crippled groom is no longer a familiar sight in our markets. It wasn’t many years ago that the ‘Horse Standing’ sign went from the yard of the Red Lion Hotel in Beaminster. At least we don’t have that caper with tractors!