John clocks up half a century

One-third of the workforce and five times the acreage. This is how John Southwick sums up the difference between farming at Sledmere today and when he started in 1960. He has just retired as farm manager after a career which began when he was 15.

"I've always lived in the village and I had been thinking about being a bricklayer or a milkman. My mother said I'd be finished by lunchtime and that I wouldn't know what to do with myself the rest of the time."

His father and grandfather had made their livelihood out of joinery and John was keen on his "brickie" work. He inquired at the estate office about a job in the building yard and they found him one on the farm instead.

"I had helped out the estate's shepherd 'Chiddy' Wilson, so they offered me what I suppose you could call the shepherd's lad role.

"We used to have sheep, cattle, pigs and a dairy herd of about eight Guernsey milkers for private use. There were nine of us working on the estate."

You were not just stuck with one job, John had no formal training, he picked it up as he went along, and knowledge and aptitude eventually got him the foreman's job in 1974.

His step-up to farm manager also came as something of a shock and he considered the offer with some hesitancy.

"I said that the paperwork would be my trouble. It was agreed that if I had any trouble with it I could go to the estate manager who would then help me."

That was 16 years ago. John's wife of 44 years, Ann, doesn't see him giving up working on the farm completely. The couple will stay in what is regarded as the foreman's house and, in the habit of many a farming retiree, John was still working when I visited.

John was also a founding member of the Sledmere-based East Riding Fire Service in 1968. John and his colleagues were "retained firemen" (part-timers), who were called out 75-100 times a year until the Sledmere station closed a decade ago. Their call-out which made the biggest headlines was the Flixborough disaster. "We were usually quite busy during harvest when straw was being burnt, but towards the end of our time 50 per cent of our call-outs were road accidents."

One day especially lives in his mind.

"We were called out to Fridaythorpe. A man had committed suicide by tying bricks to his feet and throwing himself down a well.

"We had to pump out the well first before we could get him out. We had just got back to work when we were called out again. A tarmac machine had backed up and run over a man. Two fatals in one day. That was a bit of a downer for all of us."

Sledmere House and estate has been owned by the Sykes family for many generations and during John's 50 years he has worked for both Sir Tatton and previously Sir Richard Sykes.

"Sir Tatton is very easy going and quite relaxed. Sir Richard would go around the estate and if anything was wrong, it went from him to his agent. The next morning when you went in, it wasn't to be done tomorrow, it was to be done yesterday."

The village hasn't changed much outwardly but the community has lost all its shops and the post office gave up the ghost two years ago. Ann and John are the current village ladies and gents bowls champions.

They first met waiting for a bus in Driffield. John had been dared to ask Ann to go out with him.

"The last bus out into the country at that time was at half past eight," says Ann. "John would be waiting for the Malton bus and I was waiting for the Scarborough bus.

"I knew one of John's friends who was a relative of one of my neighbours. He had dared John to come and ask me for a date."

"It was the best dare I ever had," says John gallantly.

He has now handed over as farm manager on this venerable estate to another local man, Martin Cole, who comes from Duggleby.

CW 27/11/10