Remembering Big Country Gatherings Like Devon Show
From one agricultural event in the countryside, to another - this time is the big Devon Show which i covered for 20 years as a Western Morning News feature writer, and where I shot a short video some years ago.
It think it was in 2007 - but why not give the video a quick watch. I put it up here today because - like a lot of people - I was beginning to feel a little down with the Covid lockdown and found myself remembering days when we could all gather en-masse.
And here’s a newspaper column I wrote on the subject of county shows….
The bull went crazy and smashed his way through the stalls, spreading great herds of country folk in panic as he went. That was one story I remember concerning traditional West Country shows in days of yore.
Another recollection is of the lord of the manor - a Luttrell - passing away up in Dunster Castle at the very moment when the village’s famous annual show was in full swing in the meadows far below. There was something ancient and feudal about the idea of him breathing his last within earshot of the lowing of cattle, the crackle of Tannoy and the gentle murmur of the country crowds.
But the show must go on. Year in, year out, it takes either a world war or a major epidemic of foot-and-mouth to stop the big county and agricultural shows happening in late spring and summer.
It’s strange being a country journalist - I can say that in general terms, but it is particularly strange during the showtimes because we perhaps attend more of these events than anyone else, and yet we are not really part of them.
We do not attend to display our cattle, sheep or pigs. We do not have anything to sell, or show. We do not have a say in how the events are run or what their future should be. We do not wear bowler hats or reserve tables in the Member’s Enclosures. We are never presented to whatever minor Royal personage it is who graces the show. We are never inside a ring or linked to any particular pavilion. We cannot discuss sheep breeds with expertise or know, with any genuine authenticity, what it is like to rear such animals in the hills. We will never lay claim to any kind of rosette. We do attend to purchase agricultural implements or the like. And so on…
So it’s like a riddle: we are never really a part of these massive country events - yet at the same time we are as much part of them as the poles that hold up the marquees.
After all, what is any major event if it is not reported on? It’s no good following Rene Descartes’ philosophy and regarding large happenings as a matter of cogito ergo sum - or “I think, therefore I am”. Yes, country shows would exist if newspapers didn’t report on them, but such events do rely to some extent on their story being told to a wider audience. It would be a strange world if you were able to say - a very large happening occurred in Devon yesterday but not a soul heard a single whisper about it save for the people who were actually there…
The publicity we give such events is, to some extent, the fuel that gives them permanence. It is the currency that helps draw people in its direction next year.
However, we used to do a more comprehensive job than we do now. Which meant that country shows used to be the bane of a rural journalist’s summer. In my own case it was Dunster Show that used to give nightmares.
We local reporters used to be given little marquee of our own and our newspapers would employ kids to act as runners bringing in more and more results. Results were everything. They were - and undoubtedly still are - the oxygen of such shows. And we reported on each and every one - by which I mean the firsts, seconds and thirds as well as first and second “reserves” (whatever they were).
My weekly newspaper would devote six large broadsheet pages to these results - and, as they were printed in smaller type than normal to get ‘em all in, this equated to many, many thousands of names entered into hundreds of different classes. And God help you if you got any single one of them wrong.
My fingers still ache just remembering all the clattering of old typewriter keys they used to do to achieve all this in a single day in a draughty tent. Free lunch in the Member’s Enclosure? You must be joking, we never had time.
You cannot imagine what a terrible old cheat I feel nowadays when I turn up each year at this newspaper’s stand to meet and greet any readers who may wish to say hello. It’s a lovely thing to do, but there’s a part of me that feels guilty I’m not jotting down the names of all those endless first and second reserves…
So if you ever do see me standing there, looking just a little bit uncomfortable, please come over and shake my hand because at least that will make me feel I’m doing something ever so slightly useful.
And here’s another article - written at one Devon County Show for the next day’s paper…
A man wielding a hairdryer advanced towards the giant bull, who showed not a jot of interest but gazed peacefully down at a tiny child sitting in a pushchair. Not far off some unusually handsome sheep were strutting their imperious stuff in front of ranks of admiring onlookers. Nearby a farmer was doing a deal on a house-sized tractor that was about to cost him a good deal more than the empty cottage he sold 25 years ago.
Horses cantered, jumped and kicked; pasty purveyors begged their customers to step into the long queue; supermarket bosses made life changing decisions over the future of West Country businesses; people selling wood-burners, quad-bikes, cakes, jams, ham hocks and artificial insemination programmes all quietly cajoled and persuaded.
There can be no other place like an English agricultural show and Devon County Show in particular seems to make more of a statement about the British countryside than most.
There was urban Exeter going about its daily business just a few miles from the show-ground yesterday, the motorway was slightly busier than usual and the nearby airport was playing host to its endless relay of planes. But these neighbours of the show-ground are not really of its world.
Looking out from this small temporary city, the distant Blackdown and Haddon Hills are the only visual representatives of that world. But inside its streets, show-rings and stands, the place is a Mecca of hill and dale.
This is where the Devon countryside annually embraces a got-it-flaunt-it attitude. Few turn up to these very British bean-feasts intending to hide their light under a bushel. A good county show is about achievement and success – it is emblematic of accomplishment, triumph and local glory.
But, being English, it’s an understated celebration. County shows are a unique mode of communal festivity – there tends, for instance, to be a quiet modesty about the folk winning prizes.
Even the small armies of busy stewards and even busier purveyors, artisans and salesmen and women seem to go about their work in a polite and undemanding kind of way.
If ever there was a culturally quintessential English event, it would be the classic county show. Or, to put it another way, a visitor from a foreign land would learn more about the West Country in a single day at the Devon County than they would if they’d spent an entire month travelling around the peninsula.
At least, they would at this year’s event, which is the 112th Devon Show. Why? Because its theme is: “Devon is a way of life, be part of it!” and is subtitled: “We want our visitors to enjoy a slice of the good life, no matter where they live.”
One of the organisers told me: “To come to the show is to participate in that good life, not just to observe it. It offers kinship to everyone who responds to the message, whether they are from town or country, from England or abroad.
“It may contain echoes of nostalgia for better times long gone, but increasingly the values of the countryside (hard work, honesty, sensitivity to the environment, the pursuit of excellence) are being recognised as the benchmark for the future in all walks of life.
“In this way the show represents a sounding board for the future of Devon as a whole, and not just its countryside. Hence it is relevant to all Devonians: town and country, young and old.”
I recalled those last words as I watched the tiny child in the pushchair gazing up at the big red bull. It was one of those beauty-and-the-beast moments. At no other public event in England, I thought, would such a diminutive child be allowed so close to such a huge and potentially dangerous animal.
But agricultural shows are, thankfully, the antithesis of red tape and overly worried health and safety officials – they are the countryside’s greatest ambassadors of reality. Whether they come in the guise of the bowler-hatted steward with a title, or the white-coated farmer hair-drying his beloved show beast, they seem to simply say: “This is who we are and this is what we do.”
And at the Westpoint Showground they will be doing it once again today, and again tomorrow .
