No 59. Sheep shearing pt1.

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.

SHEARING THE EWES PART ONE.

Shearing the ewes at Whitehall was a good day, full of adventure. Summer was with us, the sun was shining, the ewes fleeces were dry. Early morning father and the shepherd had been gathering in the ewes, lambs bleating and mothers calling for their little ones as the flock was herded into the yard. Sometimes they were taken in to the yard the evening before and held overnight in readiness for an early start. Or in a small paddock next the steading. Or in the stackyard.
Extra hands were gathering from here and there, some from neighbouring farms for whom the compliment would be returned in due course, perhaps some helpers from the village. We were on summer holidays from school so had a day when we could help, or think we could help. A small coal brazier fire was lit to hold the tar bucket and heat the sticky tar to make it more liquid for marking the ewes after shearing. Hot tar was also used if any sheep got a cut from the shears, being liberally spread on the open wound. Must have stung a bit but it kept the flies away and I never knew of a wound going wrong afterwards. Used for wounded seamen at the Battle of Travalgar on 21st October, 1805, a stump of a leg or of an arm shot off being dipped straight into the boiling scalding tar. First aid of a kind, brutal, but it worked, sometimes.!!!
. The shearing stance was on the green space between the high garden wall round the tennis lawn and the tar roofed wooden shed which later did service as a car garage but had been our gig shed previous to the Morris Ten car purchase in 1935. Other parts of the long black wooden shed were stores for this and that and also the padlocked coal shed at the far end. Shearing of the ewes meant much food being prepared and taken out to the very hungry shearers sitting on the green grass in the sunshine, or on a newly packed wool bag. The usual two hour lunch break was dispensed with, time on a good day not be lost. A good picnic with much humour and back chat among friends.

Odd gates and wooden flakes were tied to the spokes of carts deployed across the entrance to the green to act as barriers to contain the sheep. One cart was upended with the shafts high in the air. To this was attached two ropes one to either slider to hold the hessian wool bags of Stewart Bros., Constitution Street, Leith, now vanished into the British Wool Marketing Board and converted into a restaurant. The bags were held at a convenient height for filling, just swinging off the ground at the bottom. The trick was to put a small round beach pebble into each corner of the top of the bag folded over the stone and make a half loop clove hitch around it with the loose end free. Done properly, a sharp tug on the free end undid the loop, do it wrong such as crossing over the rope and all **** broke loose as unsuccessful attempts were made to get it to let go. With fleeces piling up for packing some unkind words were often flung at whoever had tied the bag in place. Tended not to make the same error again !!! But I am ahead of myself with the packing of the wool bags.
This was before modern machine clipping came in, though Greenland Mains had a Lister 4 gang clipper assembly put in by the Dunnet family long ago, at least pre 1933 when they sold the farm to John Scott from Fearn near Tain, where the Scotts are still farming. The Greenland Mains outfit had a Lister engine in the loft driving by a belt through a hatch in the loft floor to a shaft suspended below in the shearing shed with four of the old three-inch wide handpieces. I learned my machine shearing on it.
The shears we had filled your hand, sprung to open the blades as you relaxed your grip. Properly sprung and set, they did not open too far. Some shearers fixed a cork between the handles of the blades so they could not totally close and make a clicking sound, scared the sheep. Worked well too. For sharpening they could be sprung over the top so to speak, allowing each of the blades to be sharpened singly on an oiled sharpening stone, usually at about an angle of 45’. Some men were absolute artists at the art of getting just the right edge, so much that they were much in demand from less practiced hands. One man I knew had a small sharpening stone in his hip pocket, giving a quick touch to his blades between every sheep, the work of an instant while the catcher was taking his next sheep to him.
You can still get these shears for gardening, smaller versions, and any Agricultural Show has them as keen young men - and old - snip away imagined odd bits of wool off an already totally smooth show sheep. But we had no other at Whitehall though in the loft was an old hand cranked Lister clipping machine with a three inch clipper but it needed one man to turn the handle while the other sheared the sheep, and I never saw our father bothering. Waste of time and a good man he reckoned.
There would be a wooden shed door or two taken off its hinges set on a couple of empty barrels to use as tables for sharpening shears or for the tea basket at half yoking time. Or as a temporary bar for bottles of home brewed ale and a bucket of cold water with a dipper for thirsty teetotallers, draped with a wet tea towel to keep it cool and the flies off. Another similar table did service for rolling the fleeces, waist high and set so you could get right round it.
That task was usually done by women who were just that much better and quicker than the men at doing these jobs. Properly and tightly done, the fleece could then be thrown to a man deep down in the wool bag, just his arms sticking up over the edge at first asking for a fleece, gradually building the fleeces under his feet one each way to fill the sides until, bag full, he climbed out and stuck in two sharp spikes to hold the top edges together until finally sewn. Six inch nails were sometimes used but we had two treasured spikes used only for that job and kept in a chest which also held the well oiled sheep shears for the rest of the year. And a heavy sail needle for sewing the lip, curved upwards at the end. A Stewart Bros. label was tied to the final bit of string and inserted just below the opening, a double check on who the bag came from, though each bag had it’s own individual number.
Sometimes the fleeces were just put on a tarpaulin set against the dyke and packed later when time allowed, it all depended on how many helpers you had.
In those days before modern sheep dips, and now pour-on or injection anthelmintics, we had plagues of parasites such as sheep keds. A pretty monstrous big black louse, they could transfer to a shearer and give him a noxious bite. Or crawl under a shirt. Bloodsuckers they were, and a sheep infested with them must have been very uncomfortable. Neither did it take long for keds to appear on the lambs also. The introduction of DDT saw them off. We did not have ticks in Stronsay, not seeing any until we came to Caithness. Sheep lice were another pest. Maggot fly strike we did not have in Stronsay save one year when a warm Southerly wind must have carried them from Caithness!!