Sarah Todd: Happy to back a great Yorkshire institution again

Apart from as a baby – people weren’t daft enough to waste their day at the show with screaming children in prams like they are nowadays – there hasn’t been a year missed.

We always had lunch in the wooden General Accident pavilion. It was a thank you for the year’s farm insurance business and a goodwill gesture that, sadly, is becoming increasingly extinct. Buy a new tractor or car these days and you’ll be hard-pushed to get a cup of dishwater tea. Not like the beef, beer, wine and sandwiches (with the crusts cut off) of the olden days.

As an aside, in the days before mobile phones, showgoers all wore watches and had a “meeting up” place. If, as children, you got lost you went to the designated place. Ours was outside the Members’ Enclosure.

Talking of the Members’, it nowadays strikes me as sad to see everything from flip-flops to jeans. Light the touchpaper on her memories of “The Show” and my grandmother, now well into her 90s, will recall farmers’ wives getting their unmarried daughters done up and strategically positioned on the veranda on the lookout for a prospective husband.

Sadly, this correspondent’s sartorial standards have slipped. There was no way, in my late teens and 20s, that I wouldn’t have worn a summer dress (a proper old-fashioned Laura Ashley flower print number), blazer and straw hat. It has to be said, the judges and stewards still look dapper in their bowlers and boaters. Here’s hoping the organisers keep it up. All credit to them for supporting the county’s textile industry and commissioning a Great Yorkshire Tweed. The jackets look wonderful and the ‘Yorkshire Born & Bred’ under the collar is a trendy twist. Catch a glimpse of them on the catwalk in the Fashion Pavilion.

Back to my grandmother, watching the fashion show was an integral part of her over half a century of happy days at the show. The men would be looking at the latest in farm machinery and we girls would be watching the models strut their stuff. We would all meet up later on the grandstand to watch the military band, cattle parade and some showjumping. Just as we do now, nearly 40 years on. As an aside, there are more girls looking around the machinery now. It’s a positive development that there have never been so many female farmers.

Back then, the Yorkshire was second-string to the Royal Show. But now, as several shows including the Royal have fallen by the wayside, the Great Yorkshire is England’s undisputed premier agricultural event.

Much credit for this has to go to Bill Cowling. This will be the first year with a new honorary show director at the helm. The new chap, Charles Mills, won’t go far wrong if he follows in the same vein.

As a schoolgirl, about half the class used to be absent for at least one day of the Yorkshire Show. Now, we’re in the minority.

Some of this will be down to the faff of form-filling and having to jump through the hoops of getting permission. Others can’t face the traffic and, sadly, quite a few dismiss a day at the show as “too expensive”.

There are a few pounds to be saved if tickets are booked early, but the adult gate price of £27 and £13 for children is a fair whack. Yes, it’s not much compared to a rollercoaster-filled theme park; but if trade stands are to be supported, people need to feel they have some spending money left.

This useless mother was too unorganised to fill out the official forms and scribbled a note to the headmaster to tell him that the children would be going. Touch wood, he won’t be sending us a bill for unauthorised absence. He realises, as others should have the guts to, that children learn more at the show than they do at this end-of- term time of year.

The teenager, in particular, is keen to talk to the agricultural colleges, like Harper Adams, that have recruiting displays at the show. The younger one drives me nuts wanting to be in the Educational Zone. What a dreadful mother. “Hurry up,” I say through gritted-teeth, as he does yet another experiment on the Drax Power Station stand.

There’s a picture on the mantelpiece of the daughter handing the Queen a hurriedly-picked posy when she visited the show in 2008. But it is Prince Charles’s visits in 2011 and last year (he also came in 1999 and 2006) that were, for me, the most poignant.

For all the weight he carries on his shoulders he was so obviously, at heart, a farmer. Watching the cattle parade – livestock is the Great Yorkshire Show – he looked so genuinely interested and relaxed. His wife the same looking over the horses. Hope they make enough from the ticket sales to send him a jacket …

Sarah Todd is a former editor of Yorkshire Life magazine. She is a farmer’s daughter, mother and journalist specialising in country life.