Reading Readers – Felicity McWilliams

For this month’s Reading Readers blog, PhD student Felicity McWilliams (a familiar face at MERL) gives us an insight into how the MERL collections are playing a part in her research of draught power technology in the 20th century.

An image from Farmers Weekly showing horses and a combine harvester at work together on a farm near Durham in 1961. The farmer also used tractors but on this day they were busy on another task (MERL P FW PH2/C107/76).

An image from Farmers Weekly showing horses and a combine harvester at work together on a farm near Durham in 1961. The farmer also used tractors but on this day they were busy on another task (MERL P FW PH2/C107/76).

Last September, I left my post as Project Officer at the Museum to embark upon an AHRC-funded Collaborative Doctoral Award PhD, based jointly at King’s College London and here at MERL. I’m researching the history of draught power technology on British farms c.1920–1970. Draught power is essentially anything used to pull a load, from carts and wagons to ploughs and harvesters. I’ll admit I often get a blank look back when saying that, though, so I revert to telling people I’m doing a PhD on tractors.

It’s not just tractors though; the technological landscape of twentieth-century British farms included steam engines, horses, oxen, home-made tractors, cars, lorries, jeeps, motorcycles and even military-surplus tanks. Histories of agricultural technology (and of technology in general) have tended to focus on new machinery and innovation. Which is fine, but it means that they look mostly at manufacturers, economics and government policy and rarely at the people actually using the technology – the farmers, horsemen, tractor drivers and farm mechanics. The aim of my project is to research the wide variety of draught power sources that farmers were using and the factors that influenced their decision-making. What they could afford to buy is always important, but I’m also interested to find out how their technological skills, working relationships, values and attitudes might also have had an impact on the animals and/or machines they chose to work with.

Back issues of The Farmers Weekly in the museum's library.

Back issues of The Farmers Weekly in the museum’s library.

I’ve started by looking at the Second World War period, and over the past few months have spent a lot of time in the MERL archives reading 1940s issues of Farmers Weekly magazine. There are so many features in the magazine which help to show what farmers were thinking, discussing and buying, from adverts and articles to letters and photographs. In fact, there are so many amazing sources in the MERL archives, from films to farm diaries, that it’s a little daunting wondering how I’m ever going to find time to see everything. You can find out more about what’s in the collection here.

We’ll certainly keep up to date with Felicity’s progress and hopefully share some of the interesting things she discovers in her research.

Reading Readers – Alex Bowmer

For this month’s Reading Readers blog, PhD student Alex Bowmer gives us an insight into how the MERL archives and object collections are playing a part into his research of livestock health.

Alex examining items in the object store at MERL.

Alex examining items in the object store at MERL.

As a collaborative doctoral awarded PhD candidate, I split my time between King’s College London and here at The Museum of English Rural Life. The aim of my project is to produce a history ‘from below’ of livestock health in Britain, c1920-70. Departing from the usual historical focus on government policy and scientific experts, it aims to understand what disease meant to livestock owners and how they coped with it at a time of rapid transition in pharmaceuticals and farming systems. Traversing fields, fells, farm-yards and factory farms, it will explore farmers’ changing experiences and interpretations of disease. It will also analyse their uses of family remedies, patent medicines, modern pharmaceuticals and animal management for the purposes of disease prevention and control. As part of my research I want to answer how did these coping strategies change over time, and what factors influenced farmers’ decision-making? How did access to medical information alter disease conceptualisation? and How did attitudes to innovation affect pharmaceutical reach?

Medicine chest (Object: 75/150). The box contains various medicines used for treating animals on Royal farms at Windsor, Osborne and Sandringham up to 1937.

Medicine chest (Object: 75/150).
The box contains various medicines used for treating animals on Royal farms at Windsor, Osborne and Sandringham up to 1937.

Over the past few months I have been using both object and archive collections to further develop an understanding of how livestock owners conceptualised disease. On my first visit to MERL I was tasked with investigating and explaining the veterinary medicine collection currently held at the Museum. Some were rather dangerous to say the least! But others have generated new ideas for my research, as many human medicines appeared in a medicine chest given to me for analysis.

Farm Management Survey, FR FMS.

Farm Management Survey, FR FMS.

Over the past few weeks I have been travelling across from London to investigate the Farm Management Survey (FMS). The FMS was financed by the Government through the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and undertaken by universities and colleges in England, Wales and Scotland and the Department of Agriculture in Northern Ireland. Beginning in 1936 and renamed in 1986, the survey was voluntary and concerned the collection of financial information of over 500 farms. I have been assessing the veterinary and medical expenditure of these farms to understand whether or not it increased with the advent of new pharmaceutical and chemical medicines made available to livestock owners. Over the coming months I am going to be situated in the reading room, using the vast collections of veterinary and public health texts in MERL’s collection, to begin to write my first chapter understanding how exposure, or lack of, to veterinary knowledge altered how livestock owners tackled concerning disease rates.

Find out more about the MERL collections here. Our reading room is open to the public and you can find more details about accessing the wealth of MERL collections here.

Reading Readers – Hilary Matthews

This month, University of Reading PhD student Hilary Matthews tells us about her research into livestock portraiture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

As a Reading University PhD student, I am looking at how the paintings and prints of livestock in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century functioned within the society that produced them. My research is centred on the Museum of English Rural Life’s own collection of livestock paintings and I make a weekly 4 ½ hour round trip from my Essex home to work on the museum’s associated archives and agricultural books and ephemera in the Reading Room.

Hilary with Jacqueline Winston-Silk, Art Collections Officer, in our art store (Photo by Martha Fleming).

Hilary with Jacqueline Winston-Silk, Art Collections Officer, in our art store (Photo by Martha Fleming).

When I explain to people what I am researching the first question is invariably what do the paintings look like and secondly why were they depicted like this?  To answer the first I always tell people to close their eyes and visualise portraits of cattle, pigs and sheep with huge bodies, tiny heads and short legs. It’s amazing that when I say this almost everyone goes “oh yes I know what they look like”.  The second question, why painters depicted them like this, (although some did depict them more naturally), lies at the heart of my research.

The desire to satisfy the food demands of the rapidly growing urban population made farmers and landowners continually seek to breed animals that would satisfy this demand. My research reveals that in doing this the lines of the strong class system of the period were continually stretched and reshaped as landowners, often without the skill and knowledge to breed the best quality livestock themselves, had to rely on the poorer, but better, livestock breeders to provide them with the best stock. This stretching of the class boundaries does not seem to have applied when patrons commissioned artists to paint their animals though. To immortalise their livestock, the aristocracy seem to have engaged society artists whilst the lowly farmers employed jobbing sign painters. However, as I am discovering in the Museum of English Rural Life’s archives, this was not always the case.

A Shorthorned Heifer, Seven Years old (The Heifer that travelled) by Thomas Weaver (1811), and print engraved by William Ward  - Object No. 64/102

A Shorthorned Heifer, Seven Years old (The Heifer that travelled) by Thomas Weaver (1811), and print engraved by William Ward – Object No. 64/102

Apart from recently studying art history, I have also studied agriculture and for many years, I have bred, exhibited and judged pedigree livestock. I try to incorporate all these aspects into my research and so, for instance, in trying to understand a painting like Thomas Weaver’s, The White Heifer that Travelled, (below), I have tried not only to appraise this work as an art historian but to look at it scientifically too. A heifer is a young cow that has never calved but even allowing for artistic licence this heifer was obviously huge. Although she could have been born as a freemartin, (a freemartin is a female calf from a set of mixed twins and is invariable infertile), by trawling through the Museum of English Rural Life archives I have learned that she may have been speyed.  Around the late 1790s, farmers experimented on female cattle by surgically removing what they quaintly called the ‘lusts’. This stopped female cattle coming into season and allowed them to fatten much quicker. This sort of information helps me to understand the paintings far better – you could almost say that it puts meat onto the bones of my research.  However, in this instance I don’t think this particular heifer requires any more meat on its bones!

Find out more about animal portraiture and our collection in this blog post from October 2015 by Art Collections Officer, Jacqueline Winston-Silk.

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