'We were offered a free pint and a seat - amazing what the power of sheep dip can achieve!' New book recalls life on the farm
After a heavy day taking sheep to be dipped in the trailer of their Land Rover, John Hodgkinson suggested to his colleague they had earned a pint in the pub.
"No chance," said his friend, Mike Malcom.
"The place will be rammed full on a Friday night."
Undeterred, they pulled up in the car park of The Woodman at Claverley, and John suspected Mike may have been right. The pub was packed to the rafters, even though the night was still young.
They needn't have worried.
"As we entered, the crowds parted, and let us through to the bar," recalls John, now 78 and living in Kingswinford.
"Not only that, we were offered a free pint and a seat."
Had the young farm workers been mistaken for a celebrity? Or were the customers of The Woodman unusually gracious and generous? John thinks there may have been another reason.
"Amazing what the aroma of sheep and sheep dip can achieve," he muses. "Perhaps we should have bottled and sold it."
John, who started working on his family's farm in Pipe Ridware, near Rugeley, since the age of nine, has chronicled his working life in two books, Pipe Ridware Gets Its First Ferguson, about his youth growing up on the farm, and a sequel What a Working .Life, which describes how his fascination with machinery, and driving in particular, led him on a career change.
Born in 1947, John grew up at a time when agriculture was moving on from the make-do-and-mend 'dig for victory' mentality of the immediate postwar years towards a more mechanised industry transformed by advances in technology.
In the early days, most of the machinery on the farm was powered by Dolly, a faithful shire horse who did much of the heavy lifting on the family's 50-acres of farmland. When Dolly died, John's father William bought a secondhand Ferguson tractor from Reginald Tildesley in Aldridge, the first time such technology had been deployed in the sleepy hamlet of Pipe Ridware.
John recalls his father was not entirely happy with the change.
"To my father, the tractor was a modern device that he didn't really take to, being brought up with horses, he attempted to drive the Ferguson once and that was the only time.
"To try and stop the tractor at a gate he shouted 'whoa', and put his foot on the brake but didn't disengage the clutch, and the tractor kept going, right through the gate."
There was another problem when one day William sat on the toolbox on the mudguard, with John's elder brother Victor at the wheel.
"When the tractor came, the rear tyres were what was called 'ballasted', filled with salty water to add weight and gain traction," John recalls.
"The tractor was towing a trailer of load of much and going fairly quickly, a split occurred in one of the tyres, spraying dad with this salty water.
"He was not amused, but even less so at having to buy a new tyre."
While William was not impressed by the mechanical revolution, John was loving it, having first driven his uncle and grandmother's Fordson tractor at the age of eight. And when he was ready to get married, he jumped at the chance of a tractor-driving job at Gerald Munday's farm at Swindon, just outside Dudley, which came with a tied cottage. He had fond memories of his time on his farm, although recalled that his employer could become angry when pushed: "Gerald Monday wore a deerstalker hat and when he got angry tended to throw it on the floor and jump on it."
Frustrated by poor rural wages, he took a job with Stourbridge-based record distributors Jacksons, which brought in the princely sum of £40 a week, and a Morris Marina van. A highlight came when a sales rep wanted to borrow the van, and lent him his Austin Allegro for the weekend.
*Pipe Ridware Gets Its First Ferguson and What A Working Life are available priced £6.95 each, from Ashwood Nurseries in Kingswinford , or the canalside farm shop and cafe at Great Haywood, near Stafford canalsidefarm.co.uk
