and lamb destined for Britain.
At the start of the war in 1914, more than half the food consumed in the UK came in from abroad. Five years later, at the end of the war, British farmers were producing two-thirds of the food for a hungry home population. And they did so profitably. Even if rationing helped prevent the worst excesses of profiteering, farmers benefited from price increases and ready markets for their produce. Andy McLaren, of Nether Strathkinness, St Andrews, will be among the last of a generation to remember the latter years of that war being hungry ones, with food rationing having to be brought into play.
That war, with prowling enemy ships sinking boats full of food coming into Britain, first sharpened the nation’s attention to food security. Whatever words are used, it was the war that brought home to this island nation the fact that importing food during conflict brought hazards, such as shipping supply lines being cut by the enemy.
Even before the last guns of war sounded, the then government was planning legislation that would provide a guaranteed price for wheat and oats. It was 1920 before the Agricultural Act actually came into being, with its promise of a minimum price of 95 shillings per quarter for both wheat and oats. But within months of this financial protective shield, food imports again swamped the country. Much to the annoyance of the recently created National Farmers Union of Scotland, the government, faced with high post-war unemployment, decided to ditch the Act as a quick way of lowering the price of food.
The vast majority of farming in Fife in the early years of the last century was carried out through the tenancy system. Even though there were no large-scale landlords in Fife, such as can be seen throughout the rest of Scotland, many private landlords in the county had small, tenanted estates. Fife landlords had been characterised by the saying that they ‘had a wee puckle land, a doo’cot, and a law suit’, which translates into their ownership of a small acreage of land, a pigeon loft for food and a penchant for argument. In 1908, some 90% of the farmed land was tenanted. That percentage was stable until the end of World War I, when cash-rich tenants took advantage of cash-strapped landlords and bought their farms.
So, why were the landlords short of cash? Simply because leases were taken on a 7- or 14-year basis and landlords were unable to raise rents during the good times; reportedly, rents were actually less at the end of the war than at the beginning.
Over the next fifteen years, the percentage of owner-occupiers rose to more than 30%. It was the biggest shift in land ownership in Scotland since monastic times. The change of land ownership was helped along the way by the increase in Estate Duty, introduced in 1925. However, many of those tenants who had taken the leap into ownership may have regretted taking that step as farm commodity prices plunged in the early 1920s to levels last experienced ten and twenty years previously. Other factors further accentuating the post-war economic downturn came into play. The savage loss of life in the war had robbed the country and the farms of a large percentage of its workforce. Some indication of the Grim Reaper’s scything down of young men belonging to the rural areas can be seen to the present day just by reading the war memorials scattered around the countryside. As more and more young men were called away to fight for King and country, it was not unusual to see boys as young as 14 years of age ploughing behind a pair of horse.
Fewer men were left on the farm and those who did remain required more pay, but when commodity prices plummeted, farmers tried to negotiate a drop in wages. As we will see elsewhere, these negotiations helped form the Farm Servants’ Union.
Similar economic woes hit the urban areas and farming was in recession more quickly than was at first realised in the 1920s. In a perceptive remark in 1929, Mr Henderson of Scotscraig, the president of Cupar NFU, stated that because farmers were not getting prices to meet the costs of production, large tracts of land were going down into grass: ‘Certainly, the Nation will awake to this fatal error but then it may be too late with the farming interest largely wiped out.’
In fact, the nadir for the farming industry came in the early 1930s. The average area of land under cultivation in Scotland during that decade was the smallest since 1876. Even in the run-up to World War II, production of all commodities except poultry was much less than at its peak in 1918. This happened despite the efforts of Walter Elliot, a Scottish sheep farmer who became the Minister of Agriculture in the early years of the decade. By imposing some import tariffs and encouraging farmers to grow for defined markets, he tried to bolster the industry.
In the 1930s, there were many cases of bankruptcy and then there were the less publicised ones of suicide. It was said at the time that no farmer could look out over his neighbourhood without seeing at least one farm where the farmer had either taken his own life or had simply vanished from the scene. In the depressed years, the small parish of Carnbee lost two farmers who took their own lives, while another six went bankrupt. As was witnessed in an earlier era at Drumrack, farms let on tacks or rental periods of 7–14 years regularly were abandoned by the tenants.
Far more than in any other occupation, failure in farming, for whatever reason, is a heavy burden and one that is often carried alone. However, it was in those deep, dark days that the industry first pulled itself together and set up organisations to fight its corner. Their story is carried elsewhere in this book.
WHEN travelling through towns nowadays, every so often you come across a children’s play area, filled with swings, chutes, roundabouts and climbing frames. They are in stark primary colours and mostly surrounded by a soft rubberised area, lest the children fall off. It all seems so distant from the play area of my own childhood and of those brought up on the farms of a generation or more ago.
For youngsters growing up in the country, farmyards were our playground – the buildings, the farm machinery and the goods stored about the place provided the landscape for rich adventure and risky escapades. One favourite starting point was the farm stables; the horses had gone from the farm but the stables in the farm steading still had a certain relevance.
The size or the number of stalls in a stable gave an idea of the scale and nature of the farm. A rule of thumb was that a pair of horse could cover some 50 acres on an arable farm and so a quick count of the number of stalls would tell the size of the farm.
Some farms in Fife had two stables. Unusual, until you consider that in World War I, often the military came onto farms, unannounced, and requisitioned the best of the horses. Farmers found it was far better to split the risk and hope that those responsible for taking away the horsepower of the country to the battlefields would not realise they were only seeing half the horses on the farm.
From an early age, we youngsters could open the half-hack stable doors, where the top half could be opened for ventilation, leaving the bottom still closed with a latch or a draw bolt. Once inside the stone-built building, we could climb up onto the food troughs at the front of the stalls, which were separated by wooden partitions. Even by this age our senses were heightened by the sharp smell of the creosote applied to every piece of wood in contact with livestock.
We did not know it then but this form of disinfection was applied on an annual basis to keep at bay contagious diseases such as ringworm. Nor did we realise at that time that there was a similar reason for whitewashing all the stone and brickwork with limestone. For some, whitewashed walls equate to cleanliness and good hygiene.
For myself, and others who applied the hot lime or the creosote during the summer months when the livestock were outside, there are memories of stinging faces whenever
