Pigs at Whitehaa No 1.

A long time ago, but yesterday too. Rain On My Window (Tears in My Eyes) will be an ongoing tale of my early memories of life shared by my younger brother David on Whitehall Farm in Stronsay, Orkney, of our childhood on a working farm in the 1930s before we lost our innocence.


I must take a look at the farm again which is what I started this series on, though a day on the Midgarth Holm for gulls eggs or some other ploy of days gone away comes up as chance may dictate.
Much as I have written on cows and horses and hens there were other denizens of the farm, pigs among others. No farm animal was so well spread around Stronsay, not just on the farms but everywhere. Ubiquitous animals, there would more often than not be one at every household, sometimes more. The Villagers would each have one in a pigsty in their back garden, the cottages where lived an elderly widow would have one, the farm men would all have one. They were the ultimate waste disposal system, recycling on a grand scale, usefully consuming all the food scraps which today go to land fill sites, to rot and smell as nature intended, even if hidden under overfill. Nothing edible was wasted. The small tatties, the unused sprouting ones from last year’s crop once the new tatties came on, any burnt toast or porridge, mouldy bread, soured milk, everything could be used for the pig. And from the dairy came whey from cheese-making, or any milk or butter that had gone off, though these could usually be made good use of in the kitchen for baking. The refrigeration of today was not available. Not a problem with a pig to help out.

Just across the road from the farm house at Whitehaa was the small shed at the end of the cart-sheds building and just at the entrance to the Square, though other places held pigs in turn. There it was that our father had his farrowing sow unit, farrowing being the time of producing her young piglets. A warm tight small building, no window, just the light from the open door. an ideal quiet farrowing shed with no disturbance. When the time came and the sow was showing signs of being almost ready, the expectant mother was removed from the other sows and the boar in another old building with an outside run, a part also used for holding young Aberdeen Angus bulls for sale in Kirkwall at the Bull Sale in Sprng.
The pigsty over the road was easy to keep an eye on what was happening. A bed of dry straw, not too much in case of the ever present risk of overlaying and smothering, sometimes just chaff on a bare floor. Sows were very good mothers, usually, and best left quietly on their own to get on with producing up to sixteen piglets, though that number was high and a round dozen was regarded as being good. We bairns were warned not to even peek in to see what was doing, nor shout too much, any disturbance of a farrowing sow could have serious results. But we could hear from outside the door the quiet snuffling and squeaking from the rapidly increasing number of piglets as the sow got on with her unseen task.
The classic disaster was the sow eating her own as they appeared, a bad habit but not unknown. The farrowing crate was designed and used to prevent the sow becoming cannibalistic, keeping the sow restrained between horizontal bars so she could not turn round to get at her young. Sounds crazy that an animal could do such a thing but it did happen. Sometimes a farrowing crate was borrowed from a neighbour, sometimes owned by the farm though our father did not have one. And he did on occasion find a small piglet missing, but never to my memory an entire litter, though such did happen. The classic tale of that was our Chief Constable from Edinburgh, I think it was Edinburgh anyway, on his restful visit to his cousin Donald in Tannach. Apart from sorting his host’s tatties into big, middle and small which I already told you about, he also offered to look after the sow who was farrowing.
On Donald’s belated return from Wick, and after his cousin telling him of the impossibility of decisions, decisions, decisions on the tatties, thev went to see the sow and how she had got on. Wullie, the Chief, later Sir William, proudly showed Donald the beautiful one little piglet suckling contentedly. Donald was shocked and speechless, unusual for him. The Chief went blithely on to tell Donald what a clever little piglet it was. While he was watching the little piglet had appeared from the appropriate end of the sow, who then swallowed him whole, and he just kept on appearing again and again. Donald finally got his breath back and asked how many times that had happened. “Eleven times, Donald.” “ Weel, I thocht she wid hiv hid the roond dizen. Ah wiss right. Come on awa in tae the hoos and we’ll hae a wee dram. Better still, wee’ll hae a d*** good dram”. Such is farming.

These little piglets grew at an alarming rate, in a few days looking twice their size at birth. They soon got friendly, tearing about the pen, chasing each other, taking a bite at each other’s tails, friendly like, then on a sudden all descending together on their mother to suckle in a long line of contented piglets, snuggled close to their reclining mother. Each little piglet seemed to have it’s own particular teat, a soon established pecking order. And in some way unknown to man there was usually one small titchy piglet called appropriately the “runt”. And it would survive too, as runts tend to do.
After the successful farrowing, perhaps next day, we were allowed to look over the half door at them, a never ending visual comedy. Every day they were bigger, small mobile mushrooms. They soon learned to eat at their mother’s trough, small amounts at first but appetites soon grew. Sometimes father had a part of the pen gated off so the small piglets had their own nest and feeding area apart from their mother who could not get through the bars of the gate while the little ones did. All too soon they were moved on to another shed, leaving the farrowing pen to be cleaned out, freshly bedded with clean straw or chaff, and got ready for the next mother.

The sows we had in those days were the now outdated Large White, though here and there in the Island there would be a black sow, or a Wessex Saddleback, or anything else that had taken the fancy of a farmer on a chance day at the Mart in Kirkwall. Some would have a sow but no boar. So tie a long thin rope to it’s front leg and off a walk to the nearest farm with a boar. Or just drive the amorous sow in front of you along the road. Pigs have great memories and are very intelligent, so after the first walk to the boar and on subsequent occasions thereafter, the sow could be let loose and she would find her own way. Love is a great thing. The farthest I ever took one was from Greenland Mains to Greenvale in Dunnet where the late Bill Mackenzie kept a boar, a distance of about 4 miles. After a half day dalliance with the boar the sow would be let loose and she would walk home by herself. Traffic was not so much then!!!
Today pig farming is a such a specialised business, wonderfully efficient, computerised to the extent that Rose Farms in North Carolina, USA, which I visited, worked out that it was more efficient to take grain in huge rail wagons from grain growing Kansas to North Carolina if just for the warmer climate. Even the cost of keeping a pig unit warm during the winter was a factor in their calculations.

. But some of the fun of our early days has vanished, save here and there someone takes up the good life and re-discovers the joys of real farming, even with pigs.