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January 2024 January 2024
I fell 40 ft onto the sloping side of the chalk pit, rolled (luckily) another 20 feet, semi
unconscious. My pals rigged a travois (boy Scouts !!) and got me to safety. Close attention to detail has gone into this refurbished lido. It is not a traditional
Following a spell in hospital and the necessary ‘off school’ recovery time, my one in the sense that it is a members club and payment is by annual subscription
meanderings happened upon a smallholding, where a delightful lady was milking though you can just turn up and pay the daily rate of £15 which would make your
her goats. “Fancy a go?” she offered. (For those of any city dwellers bothering to swim a rather expensive one. However, the yearly subscription rate works out at
read this, goats only have two teats and you sit behind them to milk them). less than £1 a day and a regular user would find real value.

That decided me to get into farming as a career. 2 years at Agricultural College in Close to the city centre, this represents a stunning jewel in its crown of leisure
South Devon on a FULL GRANT and having an aged Austin Ruby (cost me £20) to facilities. Driven initially by commercial interests, it has avoided cutting corners
get from my digs to college ( 6 of us squeezed into ). and has come up with a quality facility, which hopefully will serve the city of Bristol
for many years to come. Mark Thwaytes the general manager and his staff can
I went on to get married and got a job as an Assistant Farm Manager near Rugby be really proud of what they have created.
in Warwickshire, along with a tied cottage. Arable and pigs were the style of
farming. We had a cat, a ‘runt’ piglet named ‘Wiggy’ (that lived with the cat Bob Holman
indoors (for the ‘townies’ amongst you, pigs are very well ‘house-trained’ by
nature) until the pig got too big for the furniture and had to go back to the farm.

It eventually became obvious that other farm managers that I’d got to know were
being made redundant as the farmers’ sons were coming back from college and When you respond to advertisers, do please tell them you saw their
wanting their jobs.
advert in this magazine - it helps them monitor the effectiveness of
The writing was on the wall!
their advert and helps us generate more advertising revenue!!
In my college days the notice board advertising jobs etc. included a Milling
(animal feed ) company in Poole. I rang them and asked for a job. Following a visit
to Poole I was offered a job as a Sales Representative selling animal feeds and
fertilisers. (A colleague of mine in the Seeds Department now lives an interesting
life a ‘stone’s throw’ from our Parish Church).
Fourteen years of selling stuff to Dorset Farmers was a happy time, but being
obliged to go skittling every week became chore, so I joined a German Company
selling some exciting? spray chemicals to the merchants. I told them that I wanted
to work for them and got hired **. After rising to the dizzy heights of Regional Sales
Director for the whole of the South and West of the UK. An interesting way of life
until things went ‘pear shaped’ when the Company in question began selling its
product in France cheaply, with no technical support. Farmers soon discovered
that hiring a white van for the weekend and getting to Cherbourg on the ferry,
saved a lot of money . Consequently the British arm of this company lost its profits
and fired all its Regional Directors.
** If you want work –ask for it.

During this time, I’d become a Volunteer Captain for an organisation named The
Ocean Youth Club aka OYC (now “Trust”) that had about six 25-metre LOA
(Length Over All) sailing ketches based around the British Isles. Within a week of
leaving the Agricultural Chemical Industry, I found myself in Newcastle, overseeing
the construction of a new steel 24metre sailing ketch. As it was destined to stay
working on the North Sea (not my idea of fun) I then took command of an older
24m Ketch working out of Plymouth with the delightful name “Falmouth Packet”.

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