A lifetime of love and farming commitment

Here's a quick quiz question. How many years does a platinum wedding celebrate? Here's a clue. Back in the Second World War, a young farming couple called Tom and Elsie were married on September 21, 1940 at St Thomas A Becket Church in Hampsthwaite.

Tom Scaife became one of the agricultural world's best-known showmen when he showed the Princess Royal's (Princess Mary and Countess of Harewood) Red Poll cattle throughout England. He started work on the Harewood Estate at 29.

"Elsie and I had married five years earlier and I had gone to work in the gardens," says Tom.

"But I was call-up age for going to war and was told that if I went to work on the agricultural side, in the cow house, that would mean I could stay."

Tom was born into a farming family at Sawley, Grantley Estate. Prior to joining Harewood Estate's staff he worked at Corporation Farm, near Harrogate and it was here that he and Elsie met.

"We started going out together in 1939," says Elsie. "It was the war years and everything was in darkness because of the blackouts. I remember we were getting our little house ready to live in when we were married and the Majestic Hotel in Harrogate was bombed by a sneak German bomber during the daylight hours. Our house was only half a mile away."

The couple have kept all Tom's press clippings and the years 1949-1951 are particularly special. In the Royal Show of 1950, the Princess Royal's animals were competing against the King's. Cherished possessions include the pictures of Tom showing Harewood Leader at both the Royal Show in Oxford and at the last Great Yorkshire Show at Malton in 1950. Tom won all three championship awards for Red Polls that day and still has the cuttings from the Daily Graphic, the Yorkshire Post, Leeds Mercury and Harewood Leader.

Elsie was very fond of the Princess Royal. "She would come up and make such a fuss of our son Maurice in his pram when he was a baby – and she was good with our daughter Caroline, too."

Tom and Elsie moved to Great Ouseburn in 1952 to a county council smallholding where they ran a mixed farm including a Friesian dairy herd and an egg production business with 500 laying hens.

"We have always done everything together," says Elsie. "When Tom was clipping sheep I would be holding them or getting them ready for him. My mother was from a farming family. She married a man who wasn't a farmer and she didn't want any of her children to go back into it. She had six of us and we all ended up back in farming!"

Today, Tom, 94, and Elsie, 89, live in Upper Poppleton, near York. They have four grandchildren and their son Maurice still farms.

CW 18/9/10