Dan, Jade, Melissa and Olly, students from Bournemouth University are bringing us a series of blogs about their work with some of our Oral History interviews.
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We’re back in this blog post to talk about one of the interviews which has piqued our curiosity. The interview is with Mr Percy Tory who lived at Crab Farm in Shapwick, Blandford. The farm belonged to the Bankes family, who were a prestigious family in Dorset and owned a significant amount of land. The farm itself was leased to three generations of the Tory family, allowing Percy Tory to be a knowledgeable interviewee when looking at its history. The Tory family obtained an inter-generational lease for the farm in 1885, which is how the lease has stayed within the family for such a long period of time.
“There is not a large arable farm in the whole county of Dorset which would be more south after or more easily let that this. It has every possible advantage in the way of house, buildings, roads and situation.”
D-BKL/E/A/5/179: Extract from a letter to the Estate Office, 13 April 1924
From Percy’s memories of the farm as a child, his grandparents were dairy farmers and kept horses. His grandmother had five herds of Friesian cattle, two of which he took on when he took over the farm in 1949. The farm has changed considerably over the years, with Percy describing that the cattle were milked by hand when he arrived at the farm in the late 1940s, with it taking four herdsmen around three hours to milk the cows.
This changed to mechanical milking during the years that Percy was there allowing the farm to become more modern, productive and profitable. As of 2010, dairy farming on this farm no longer took place due to there being a lack of funding which was needed to update the equipment. At the time of the interview beef production was still taking place on the farm, and horses were still kept, with Percy and his family being interested in horse racing.
Through shifting from dairy farming to becoming the Dorset Game Larder, Crab Farm is moving with the times, as game has become increasingly popular in the past decade. Percy himself says within the interview that
“Game was once a poor man’s food, then a rich man’s food, now everyone likes it!”
As you can see from Percy’s memories of the farm, its function has changed a great deal, especially within the last ten years, with Percy and his family constantly adapting the farm’s purpose to make it more financially viable. This has been the general trend within the farming industry with farms increasing looking for other ways to make money. Crab Farm is now the Dorset Game Larder which takes game from shoots that which may have otherwise gone to waste if someone was unable to sell all the pheasants etc that they killed on a shoot.
Source Used: D-1931/4/1/5. Mr Percy Tory. 13 July 2016. Recollection of Life.