Foot and mouth’s lasting impact on my father – Yorkshire Post Letters

From: Margaret Ellis, Brighouse.
It is nearly 20 years since the foot and mouth epidemic.It is nearly 20 years since the foot and mouth epidemic.
It is nearly 20 years since the foot and mouth epidemic.

I READ with interest the article, ‘‘The disease that devastated farms’’ (The Yorkshire Post, December 26) and was reminded of the horrors of the foot and mouth disease during the late 1960s.

It was a bitterly cold winter’s day in late 1967 and I was 16. I remember it so vividly. I was walking down the lane towards home. I could hear this incessant, horrendous, blood-curdling squealing and the firing of guns. It sounded to be coming from the farm further down the lane. I felt sick and in a state of shock and wondered what was happening.

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When I arrived home I could tell by my mother’s face that there was something seriously wrong. She looked pale and had a strange far away look. I asked ‘What is that awful squealing Mum?’

Farming was left devastated by the foot and mouth epidemic in 2001.Farming was left devastated by the foot and mouth epidemic in 2001.
Farming was left devastated by the foot and mouth epidemic in 2001.

‘It is at the farm. They have to shoot all the pigs and cows because of foot and mouth disease.’ Eventually, this shattering event was to change our lives.

It was reported that foot and mouth disease had started at Bryn Farm, in Shropshire. One of the sows was lame and after the vet had been called, foot and mouth was diagnosed in 17 pigs. The farm was immediately put into quarantine and general animal movement was banned. One cow had been sent to market and another stopped from reaching it by the police.

The cow did not show any signs of infection and a decision was taken to disperse all other animals that had been at the market rather than slaughter them.

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Subsequent inspection showed that none of these animals were infected from contact with animals from Bryn Farm.

In the following months, over 2,634 outbreaks were detected, mostly in the North West of England, the Midlands and North Wales. The UK adopted a policy to control imports from countries where foot and mouth was endemic.

The source was believed to be remains of legally imported infected lamb from Argentina which entered the food chain. During 1967 and 1968, 442,000 animals were slaughtered in 32 weeks, a rate of 13,500 a week when it was at its peak.

The epidemic centred on the Cheshire plain where I lived. This part of the country had one of the highest concentrations of livestock in the world at that time. It was spread by wind, birds, rodents and other fauna. Pigs are the most prolific producers of the disease, therefore most dangerous to other livestock.

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At the farm where my father worked, over 1,000 pigs and several thousand mostly Friesian dairy cows were slaughtered. It was those pigs squealing that I heard on this fateful day.

Army personnel were drafted in to assist the farm workers. Enormous pits were dug on the farm and pyres were lit in which to place the slaughtered animals. The stench from those pyres was sickening. Not one of these animals was diagnosed with foot and mouth disease, but in order to contain the disease this compulsory carnage took place. This was a bitter pill to swallow.

I can see my father’s face now on that fateful night when he came home from work. He burst into tears and sobbed uncontrollably as he made attempts to communicate the appalling mass murders.

I had never seen my father cry before. He was fairly strict and had witnessed so many horrors during the Second World War in Burma, India, Malaysia and Japan. This was something else.

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He never came to terms with this abhorrence. The farm didn’t replace its livestock for many years and my father and his friends and colleagues were forced to look for alternative employment. This was earth shattering for us all at the time.

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