Tag: Davis

A Bed of Silage

In the photograph below, taken in summer 1957, my father stands on the bed of silage, legs akimbo, hands on his hips, looking knowledgeable, he hopes, while to the left, my grandfather in his show-day suit, shirt and tie, observes this farm innovation on hitherto unseen industrial-scale agriculture. Both men wear hats. The third man is Gerard McGuckian of AA McGuckian’s Ltd at their 700-acre farm near Antrim. Granda is making plans to take this new idea back to the Free State. In the lower picture, you would be forgiven today, thinking he could be checking his phone, but more likely he is making a note or filling his pipe with that crooked finger the child on his knee thought was permanently bent for the purpose.

My father, Tommy McWilliams, was a bread-man, and as far as I know, his farming experience was limited to his family’s Ballymena town allotment; and maybe to picking spuds in the surrounding farms. His father-in-law of six years, Richard Davis, had a collection of small hungry farms in North Leitrim, insignificant by comparison to the McGuckian’s spread on the fertile shores of Lough Neagh. However, in Leitrim, granda was a progressive farmer and built the first silage pit there.

Granda was impressed with the scope of his son-in-law’s contacts, and by a progressive Northern Ireland. Daddy was chuffed with the day’s work, though I’ve no idea how he made contact with the operators of such a large farm. It was most likely coincidence that the Special Reporter from the Farmer and Stockbreeder visited on the same day as they posed for the camera. It’s also my guess it was during the 12th fortnight when Daddy got his annual holidays, and granda and granny were on their one and only visit to Ballymena after the recent birth of Nigel, then few months old.

Nigel asked me recently if I had a copy of a picture he recalled seeing among the various family records. If it was anywhere, I had it. He was right. The scanned 1957 newspaper article with these pictures was easily found and emailed to his small olive farm in Spain within an hour of asking. The Special Reporter – no name was used –  was likely drawn to the novel self-feed silage system for wintered stock, and the fact that the cattle lay on A Bed of Silage.

About 1975, after finishing a course at Greenmount College, Nigel landed a job with agitech company, Masstock, which had been set up on this same Antrim farm by the next generation of McGuckians, Paddy and Alistair.  They had a contract to develop dairy farming and milk and yoghurt sales in Saudi Arabia. These were large irrigation-based units, technology- and investment-heavy.

Nigel was one of the first two Irish workers joining the operations manager on their base in Durma, west of Riyadh.  Two years later, the first milk flowed from the imported cows.

Presently, Nigel and Angelika work a small olive farm and their Airbnb southwest of Seville; Nigel has retained enough Arabic to get on well with many people of North African extraction who work in the olive and soft fruit industry there.

The connection between the farming article, with its pictures of my father and grandfather, and Nigel appears to be another coincidence.

The Masstock staff and workers who went out to those arid lands are planning a 50-year reunion, hence the interest in a copy of this rare reportage on an earlier McGuckian enterprise.

Back in 1957, my grandfather’s silage pit at Boggaun was the first in the area. After a couple of disastrous attempts at silage making, it lay unused for many years, built with a design flaw. Had he waited, it would have incorporated sloping sides that ensured the rush-covered grassy heap compacted and didn’t rot. As youngsters, we played in the empty concrete galley. Our Uncle Cecil later used it with a plastic cover, not available until the mid-1960s, to make middling silage from his fields with shallow, dauby soils.

My father remained a bread server and retired to live happily near my granda’s place, care-taking Nigel’s farm while he continued to work in Saudi Arabia.

Masstock Systems and McGuckian brothers expanded their agribusiness beyond Saudi Arabia and in 2008 Masstock was bought out by Irish agribusiness company Origin. The milk and dairy industry did little to liberalise Saudi Arabia.

Nigel and the young men and women who went to Saudi Arabia working in the scorching desert, turning some of it green, living with restricted movement and no – limited? – alcohol, made the best of it; as I hope they will at their reunion.

A full version of the Farmer and Stockbreeder article is available on request.

PDF version here.

Loose Ends.

This blog arose from previous family history posts, a few loose ends that had puzzled me. The first two of these are tidied up with the answers that were in plain sight, I hadn’t realised their significance. The last is perhaps frivolous.

Firstly, I only recently realised that both my parents grew up in families dealing with the consequences of their collapsed family enterprises.

Hugh McWilliams, paternal grandfather, had a thriving coach-building business which collapsed with the rise of the motor car.

Richard and Annie Davis’s County Leitrim family was thrown into a crisis of debt when Richard’s business partner absconded to North America with the assets of their cattle business.

These early decades of the 1900s saw major political tension and flux, which culminated in Irish independence and partition. While both families were Unionist, with connections to the Orange Order, they ended up on either side of the new border.

Each family adapted to changed circumstances. Hugh and Lizzie abandoned their home and Hugh’s workshop for a smaller two-up two-down house. Hugh went out to work as a jobbing carpenter, and it was said that he became somewhat of a recluse. Richard and Annie’s family was deeply in debt for many years, finally reclaiming the last of the mortgaged farm in the 1940s. These decades proved exacting for the growing family of nine, compounded by the loss of toddler Maureen in 1923 and Herbert at nineteen in 1939. Despite their prosperous-looking two-story slated house overlooking a main road, neighbours could easily tell the family was in dire straits, and spending had been cut to the bone.

The second insight was that Robert McWilliams, my great-grandfather’s second marriage in 1867, noted as a civil marriage that could have been in a registry office, was to Eliza Bamber, fifteen years his junior. Eliza was pregnant at the time and Ann, their first child, was born four months later. Ann died of TB at the age of nineteen.

Is this a likely explanation of my Aunt Martha’s single acknowledgement of him with a shake of her head and a look of disgust? And the reason for our strongly Presbyterian family’s disinterest in their ancestors and relations? Were they ashamed of their past? Nothing is known of Robert’s first marriage or how it ended.

James Boyle, writing in 1834 in the Ordinance Survey Memoirs says: Ballymena people are a rather moral race – though the number of public houses there being 107, would lead one to suspect otherwise – they are indeed fond of whiskey and too many indulge in it. On Saturday evenings the number of drunkards on the streets is disgraceful, but they are mostly from the country.

Robert was from the country. He moved into Ballymena following his second marriage and joined Second Ballymena Presbyterian Church, where I suspect he became an earnest member, and raised his family in strict faith and observance.

Robert and Eliza’s church, second building on the right, when they moved to Ballymena after their marriage in 1867, living a short walk away in Alexander Street.

The major expansion of all churches in Ireland and beyond during the mid 1800s was driven by zeal to rescue the general populace from sin and immorality, mainly drunkenness and promiscuity. Shame and guilt proved significant drivers of the increase in church numbers and the subsequent period of new church building. Robert and Eliza were among these new converts.

Lastly, a memory from my grandfather’s knee, where Granny often fed me buttered bread with sugar. One evening, Granda raised a finger to one nostril and blew some offending material out the other and into the wide hearth. Funny how some things stay with you.

So, what it this called? – blowing mucus, snot, down one nostril. It’s common among farmers and outdoor workers, among cyclists and runners. A male thing, perhaps? Searching in English, only slang turns up, a farmer’s blow, which seems appropriate, and a snot rocket. There’s no medical term I can find.

So far, nothing in Gaelic, but the closest might be Smuga a chaitheamh amach, (SMUH-guh uh KAH-huv uh-MOHKH ) to expel snot – a phrase my mother might well have remembered with her achievement of a Silver Fáinne medal. I’ve asked around Buncrana with one positive reply – in West Africa’s Yoruba, the word is, fumu, short and explosive, as it is.