No 105 A Tea to Remember.

No 105. A tea to remember.

A bowl o’tea was standard in many houses of my early aquaintance. Along with a jug of milk and a bowl of sugar, though I have often seen an empty 1lb jam jar doing sterling service as a sugar bowl.
The bothy men had bowls filled with milk and set aside at night for their porridge in the morning. Then the same bowl held their tea to finish their breakfast with oatmeal bannocks or beremeal or flour scones.



Most farmhouses used bowls or mugs rather than teacups but would always have a set of best china for visitors or for the Minister. This was often a set passed down from a previous generation. If so it was treasured and washed only by the Mistress. If any damage was done it was her own fault!!! Kept safely on a shelf in a locked sideboard in the dining room.
We used to admire the different patterns on the fancy tea sets when visiting but as children we never got a cup for ourselves. Far too precious. Always some mugs would be found for us to have a “glass of milk”. The Mugs of 6th May, 1935 of George Vth and Queen Mary’s Silver Jubilee were much in demand, and we all got ones from school as a memento of a special day. Some are still treasured, most I guess are now broken but definitely not all!! I saw one quite recently, it brought back memories.

I never did like having a cup of tea and a saucer in my hand or on my lap, much too precarious. Still don’t!!!
Along with the bowl of tea a table would be blessed with new baked scones, flour scones, bere bread, oatcakes. Cheese and crowdie. Drop scones thickly covered with home made butter and spread with crowdie. Drop scones covered with butter and jam.
Home made jam at that, mostly rhubarb which grew wild as well as in the gardens, often with a bit of ginger in it. Or blackcurrant.

Bringing me back a long way, I was in a house just lately where the bowls appeared, beautifully patterned in deep blue. An empty glass had held a malt whisky, and a good one at that. An adventure with tea in a bowl. Drop scones new baked with crowdie on top, oven scones with thick butter!!! Most enjoyable it was.

I have had other adventures with tea in a bowl.

Going home to Stronsay from Wartime school in Inverness and going out on a very early sailing from Kirkwall on the old S.S.Thorfinn, I had breakfast on board. The galley was indeed small but warm. Another older Stronsay man I knew was also going home for a bit of leave from the Army.
Cooking was done beside us on the galley stove, the smells of Horne’s Orkney Bacon making the mouth water. Thick slices, no modern water cure then!! Fresh eggs. Thick sausages from John T. Flett’s butcher shop. Fried bread. Though rationing was now the order of the day, there was no sign of it on the Thorfinn!!
Orkney butter, Orkney cheese, jam, loaf bread in thick slices. Nestles Condensed Milk in a tin. Sugar in a jar. And scaldingly hot strong black tea in a bowl.
The other memorable tea in a bowl I had was many years later at the Dounby Show. David Leggat of Macdonald Fraser Marts from Perth, by then United Auctions, was going to Dounby to judge at the Show. I got a lift from him from the St Ola at Stromness in his hire car. It was early, the pens were just beginning to fill and judging not yet begun.
The tea tent, actually making use of an old slate roofed building, was open. I was first in, getting No 1 ticket off a roll of raffle tickets being made use of. Orphir W.R.I. was doing the catering that year, though I believe it rotates around the branches.

Trestle tables and stackable chairs. On the table home baked thick flour scones, beremeal bannocks, scones, oat cakes, loaf bread, home made butter and farm house cheese. I filled myself. And then one of the lassies topped it all when she came over to me and asked me “Wid thu like some fancies??” No chance, no room.
And to top it all, scaldingly hot strong black tea in a bowl.

 

No 105 Fanners.

No 105. FANNERS.

At Whitehall we had a fanners in the loft, hand powered, every farm had one. Some farms had two, much used to clean up grain for selling or for seed. Many farms had two lofts if not three, and each loft had its own fanners as they were relatively cheap and it was easier to have one in each loft rather than tediously moving one around. Not too heavy but a bit clumsy for moving through doors and down and up stairs to different lofts although moving along the floor of a loft to each heap of grain was easy. At Lower Dounreay from Nov. 1953 to May 1956 we had three lofts each with its own fanners, though we did not use them much.
At Isauld we had a good fanners taken up from Lower Dounreay in 1956 but we had an excellent new Garvie threshing mill that cleaned grain to perfection. Full finishing, double fan, adjustable wire screen, loft conveyer, bruising as we threshed.
Fanners preceded proper thrashing mills by quite some time and were the forerunner of the threshing mill. In 1784 Andrew Meikle, a Scotsman, put together the simple hand mill and the even older fanners to build his first proper threshing mill. This he patented. He improved his design which has lasted the test of long years and is still the basis of most threshing machines and then on to the combine. The only attempt to move away from Meikle’s old straw walker system was Massey Ferguson who quite some years ago built and sold a cylindrical straw walker combine which worked well enough but is I think now forgotten. It did not do too well with damp straw, Caithness has plenty!! It worked well enough in North America where the harvest conditions were so very much drier, but that machine did not last long in production.
Winnowing grain consisted of throwing it into the air and letting the wind blow the chaff and bits of straw to one side. Still done outdoors in some of the poorer parts of the World for rice or millet. There is the well known feature of two opposing winnowing doors in nearly all old roofless croft barns still to be found everywhere. The old system of having two doors opposite each other in the barn for winnowing only worked if the wind was blowing. Often grain was taken outdoors and winnowed on a clean flagstone-floored stance kept for that purpose. Or on a bit of hard beaten clay ground outside the barn door.

The invention of the fanners was much needed, but it was a tedious task, one man turning the handle, one man filling the hopper with a scoop box from the grain heap and taking away the cleaned grain. Then they would change round for a spell. They were a much needed adjunct to the flail and to early threshing machines which did not do a good job of cleaning chaff from grain.

I have done that work in my younger days, turning the fanners handle at a certain measured pace, not too fast, not too slow. That determined the force of the blast of air which separated the grain from the chaff and controlled the quality of the grain you wanted to sell or put to the meal mill. It was quite heavy work if you were at it all day.

I was told there was a design of fanners where there were two handles, one either side. The idea was to maintain a steadier flow of air from the fan as with the handles being opposed one man was pushing while the other pulled. It would have needed three men to work it and did not find favour. I never saw one.

At first there was only one grain outlet at the side but fanners soon developed into two outlets with heavier grain out of one and lighter out of the other. Chaff and bits of straw flew out over the end. There is an excellent fanners at Laidhay Museum, supplied by W. & A. Geddes Wick , Agents. I was informed they made their own fanners long since but they could have sold on ones made elsewhere. Back a 100 years ago many farm articles were made locally by skilled men. To make fanners in Wick would not have been difficult.
The Foundry in Thurso, McKidd followed by Hutchinson, made many bits for them and for others.

Two Shearer brothers who came from Canisbay went to Turriff, Aberdeenshire, and set
up in business as Millwrights. They could have learned their trade with Geddes. They
manufactured and distributed many good small hand mills suitable for crofters and also
made good fanners. Like so many other small businesses, as a firm they are long gone.

Bamford Tulip Top Engine.

 

No 101 Little engines.

be an ongoing tale of my early memories of life shared by my younger brother David on Whitehall Farm in Stronsay, Orkney, of our childhood on a working farm in the 1930s before we lost our innocence.






BAMFORD TULIP GAS STATIONARY ENGINE. 1933 2.5 H.P.

Little engines were a feature of my early days. They were to be found in many situations and on many small farms, indeed on bigger ones too for many various purposes. Prime one was driving the small threshing mills which most crofters had. Where water was available many farms, big or small, had a dam and water wheel for powering threshing mills. But often water was not available so the two-horse mill course was used. More horses for larger mills on larger farms.
As time went on steam engines developed but again only larger farms could afford them. The best horse course I remember was the octagonal stone built roofed mill course at Rattar Mains. Later a chimney stack was added in one corner for a steam engine. Both are now long demolished. Many Caithness farms had high chimney stacks for a steam engine, few now if any are left. Perhaps Ackergill.


There was a steam engine at the Bu of Rousam in Stronsay with my grandfather David, fed by coal shipped in from Newcastle.
Wm Tait’s Diary records :-
“1896. Aug 08 sat 4 plows in Brecks a.m. - 3 carts at pier for coal p.m.
Got home 8 tons coal, 8½ tons in Engine house at this date. 8 cwt in coal house.”
So the steam engine got 8 tons, the farm house had 8 cwts.

Even a windmill was used on some farms but these were very rare and had to be free standing from the other buildings as the windmill had to rotate to catch the wind. Just like a Wind Turbine now. I think meal mills would have been the only reasonable users of windmills, as in Holland, through if a thrashing mill could have been worked it would have needed to have a sheaf loft to be first filled with sheaves before thrashing commenced. Or a windmill driving a water pump for the flagstone quarries at Castlehill, one now unused stone built tower is to be still seen there.
There was a multi-bladed windmill at the Ayre of the Myers which pumped water from almost sea level at the marshy Ayre o’ the Mires to the Reservoir situated half a mile up the road to Whitehall. It was one of the ones so beloved of photos of the Australian outback, pumping water at isolated sheep stations for livestock drinking troughs, and no doubt the houses as well.
Our father took care of the Windmill and the Reservoir which fed the Water Supply System for Whitehall Village. That Ayre o’ the Mires windmill had to be started and stopped as required, which task our father took care of himself, or more often had someone from the Village half a mile away do so for him on a regular basis. The water was pumped uphill to the red corrugated iron covered Reservoir where it went through first a large settling tank, then spilled over into a second settling tank filled with a bottom layer of gravel and sand off the beach. That was all the purification it got, a filtering system using what nature provided, no chemicals at all.
It was much used and kept the Village and the herring drifters in season and the Harbour supplied with water. I remember it being cleaned out once and the deep layer of muddy gravel and beach sand being replaced with a clean layer in the second tank, and a layer of fine mud being taken out of the first settling tank. Hard work for men with shovels, buckets on a rope and carts at the door. The system worked well though, simple if it does look now.

There was one little engine I remember half way to the Village at the Water Reservoir. It was our house water supply engine. I cannot recall what make it was, but Lister springs to mind. Smell of oil and and the petrol which was kept in a red metal two gallon can of which there are still a few around. Davie Chalmers in the Village supplied the petrol and oil. Generally father started the engine on his way to the Village, stopping it on his way home. Or put just enough petrol into it if he was to be in the Village for a long time so it stopped of its own accord when the fuel ran out, self regulating. Starting was by turning a handle and sometimes much hard turning before it fired and all was well, chugging away until the measure of petrol ran out, a self timing device.
The only other control was the overflow pipe from the header tank in the house which told father that the tank was full and he would go down to the Reservoir and stop the engine.

Small engines were fascinating apart from driving the threshing mills of crofts.
For farm thrashing mills Stronsay was not too well blessed with suitable water to fill a mill dam so the old horse mill course was used. Then small engines appeared. I do not know when but they generally replaced horses for thrashing the crop, possibly about 1900 or so. I can hear them still, the slow thump thump thump of these small engines echoing. Some of them are still around, beautifully polished and lovingly kept and in working condition at the Vintage Machinery Club Shows at John O’Groats. Or at the County Show.
There is one to be seen in a corner at Mary Anne’s Cottage in Dunnet, used for driving the Crofter’s Mill and the 4 inch bruiser when needed. Still turns sweetly enough but the fuel tank has been removed so no need to fear for safety if someone started it!! Not much space for it but enough.
It is a Bamford Tulip Top Gas Stationary Engine. 1933 2.5 H.P. which ran on petrol. I got a wonderful photo of one from Princeton University in the U.S.A. I also turned one up on the Internet by entering the name above and, with earphones on, I watched it turning away with the old familiar sound of hitting and missing in my ears. Quite magical and almost emotional.
It was called “ a hit and a miss” engine because the speed was governed by a mechanical governor that pushed in a spring-loaded valve now and again when the engine ran a bit faster. That killed compression so the engine gave a miss and thus kept to a constant speed. It ran on petrol with no sparking plug or magneto and fired on compression, as do diesel engines today.
The final one I remember with affection was a Lister engine at Greenland Mains. It sat in the grain loft above a hatch below which was a horizontal shaft with 4 sheep shearing units, driving with a belt through the wooden floor. There I learned my sheepshearing with a 3 inch hand-piece. The engine was about 5 h.p., water cooled from a header tank, single cylinder, ran well. Where it is now I know not.
These small engines were remarkably good, and, on asking someone in Castletown old enough to remember the Bamford Tulup Top, he said he had never seen one taken apart as they just kept on working!!!