Although I will never forget the cold of 23 Kirkgate, those days of frost and snow were ones that instil warm and nostalgic memories. Snow has always fascinated children and I was no exception. My father felt somewhat differently about it. Snow meant sledging and snowball fights to me but it spelt trouble for him, preventing his reaching many of the outlying farms. The massive snowfall of 1947, when it snowed almost every day from January until April, often confining him to the house for days, meant a loss of revenue that he could ill afford.
If Alf had little comfort in his home, he had even less in his car. The smooth, modern motor cars of today, with their warm and comfortable interiors, bear scant resemblance to the harsh little machines that Alf drove. Lengthy journeys to farms during those winter days and nights were ones of sheer endurance. The cars had no heaters and, in the severest of weather, with the windscreen white with frost, he would travel with his head out of the window to make sure he was still on the road. With virtually non-existent brakes, and tyres as smooth as glass, these journeys were not only uncomfortable, they were dangerous. Mercifully, there was far less traffic on the road than today.
As a very young boy, I have painful memories of winter journeys in my father’s cars in which I used to suffer agonies of cold. I was always a rather noisy little boy and, in response to my cries of discomfort, he would urge me to wiggle my toes in my Wellingtons or clap my hands to get the circulation going.
The lack of a heated windscreen was an enormous handicap but, one day, I remember my father proudly showing me his latest acquisition. It was a piece of wire that attached to the windscreen inside the car with two rubber suckers. The ends of the wires led from the car battery and after flicking a switch, an area of melted frost, about six inches square, eventually appeared on the windscreen. ‘Look, Jimmy!’ he said, peering forward through the tiny field of vision. ‘I can see! Isn’t it wonderful!’
It was not only the discomfort of his early cars that Alf had to contend with; it was their lack of power. His old Austin Seven had a top speed of around 50–55 miles per hour but to approach such a speed resulted in a colossal noise accompanied by stupendous vibration. At 50 miles per hour, he felt as though he were breaking the sound barrier.
These small horsepower engines were a great disadvantage for anyone working in a hilly district. One of the worst hills in the practice was Sutton Bank, a steep gradient of 1 in 4 that presented a formidable barrier to anyone needing to reach the high ground of the Hambleton Hills. The modern motor car sails up the bank in high gear but, all those years ago, it was a feat of engineering to reach the top. Alf’s little cars just could not cope with Sutton Bank but he soon developed a technique to overcome this difficulty. The small, rear-wheeled cars – like his old Austin Seven – were lower geared in reverse so, on approaching the foot of the hill, he used to perform a three-point turn in the road before crawling up backwards.
Although life at 23 Kirkgate could never be called comfortable, Alf was happy; he was working in a part of the country that he loved, and in a practice that he could call his own.
Alf’s happiness was enhanced in 1946 when his oldest friend, Alex Taylor, returned from the war and came to live in Thirsk. Having spent the war years in the African desert and the mountains of Italy, he had left the forces without a job, hoping to find employment near to his old friend in Yorkshire. He was engaged to an American girl, Lynne, whom he had met in Rome, and who was soon to join him in Thirsk.
Alf was delighted to see Alex again. He had always had a special affection for his great friend from Glasgow. He wrote to him in Africa at the time of my birth in 1943, asking him to become my godfather. I was christened James Alexander, after the man whom he regarded as his oldest and dearest friend.
When he returned to Britain, Alex was young, fit, about to be married, and was ready to embark on a new life back home. There were only two minor problems; he was completely broke and had not the slightest idea what he was going to do. At this point, Alf stepped in to help him. Alex stayed at 23 Kirkgate for several weeks, during which time he accompanied Alf on his farm visits. He enjoyed the open-air life so much that he decided to make a career for himself in farming.
Alf contacted one or two local farmers, and Alex and Lynne, who married in May of that year, were soon in lodgings with Tommy Banks of Oldstead, a fine and well-respected farmer with a good herd of dairy cows. Farm workers were very poorly paid but Alex received his keep as well as gaining some invaluable practical experience.
At the time before mechanisation, with many tasks having to be performed by hand, every farm employed large numbers of men. Such jobs as hay making, harvesting and mucking out the fold yards were completed by hours of hard physical labour. The old term ‘farm labourer’ meant just that. The men developed bodies as tough as teak and although Alex reckoned that he was fit and strong – during his five years in the army, he had trekked countless miles through the mountains of Italy – he was ill-prepared for the Yorkshire farmer’s typical working day.
One of his first jobs at Tommy Banks’s farm was to carry 16-stone sacks of corn up the granary steps. Tommy’s sons, Fred and Arthur, could run up the steps with the sacks on their shoulders but when the first sack was put on Alex’s shoulders, his knees buckled and he collapsed on the floor, his arms and legs thrashing beneath the huge sack like a stranded beetle. It was a welcome piece of light entertainment for the farm lads.
After leaving Banks’s farm, Alex and Lynne found lodgings in Thirsk where they remained for three years. Alf was able to find more work for Alex with a number of farmers who were good customers of the veterinary practice.
Following his time with Tommy Banks, his next job was with Bertram Bosomworth, and it was no easier there than it had been at Oldstead. It was harder. In his heyday, Bert – who is still alive to this day – was the epitome of the rugged Yorkshire farmer, a man whose life was one of work. He worked ‘all the hours God sent’ and expected his men to do the same. A hard but fair man.
Alex remembers wryly how, during the biting winter, he would set out at six o’clock in the morning to ride the three miles to Bert’s farm on Joan’s old rusty bicycle. Here, as well as the regular back-breaking chores of milking the cows, feeding and mucking out, he would pick frozen sugar beet out of the iron-hard ground for hours. He returned home each night in a state of complete exhaustion. He would stagger into the house and collapse onto a chair, his head bowed and his arms dangling by his sides. As Alf looked at the limp form with its cracked and bleeding fingers, he often wondered whether he had done his friend a good turn in introducing him to the life of a farmer.
Bert Bosomworth said to Alf one day when he was making a farm visit: ‘Aye, I do like Alex. He’s a grand bloke. You know, I don’t think of him as a worker, he’s a companion!’ Alex Taylor, Bert’s ‘companion’, laughs heartily when we talk about those old days now, but he wasn’t laughing fifty years ago.
There is an old proverb, ‘hard work never killed anyone’. This is debatable. Many farmers and veterinary surgeons were crippled by hard labour but men such as Bert Bosomworth are, perhaps, testimony to some truth in the old saying. There is little wonder that my father respected the Yorkshire farmers of his day; some of these men seemed to him to be almost indestructible.
Although the sapping work on the Yorkshire farms almost destroyed Alex Taylor, it provided the first step on the young man’s road to a successful career in estate management that was to take him all over the United Kingdom. He would never forget the help he received from his friend Alf Wight during those tough, unrelenting days in Thirsk.