Caroline Stride, Transcript 2, Part 5
Images: Caroline Page, copyright reserved. For any rights requests, please contact the New Forest Heritage Centre in the first instance.
Caroline Stride Trans2 CH5 Duration: 7:02
CB: Roughly. Okay, sixty-three (CS263)
Caroline: Ooh, right, well: Yeah, this must’ve been [information withheld] mount in the races; and [information withheld] at the head of the horse. Directly above the saddle is Bill House; and to the side of him just the headshot that you see I guess would be Brian Bridle and the gentleman to the right of the picture is Dave Maton, who was [information withheld] Maton’s brother.
CB: Sixty-four (CS264)
Caroline: Before any of the races or if that is at the races or the Stallion Passing the ponies are measured and that’s John Broughton measuring a pony.
CB: And he was the Society vet wasn’t he?
Caroline: Yeah.
CB: I don’t know, who’s holding it?
Caroline: A familiar face but I can’t put a name to it.
CB: Okay.
(CS265)
Caroline: This must be the Stallion Passing, I would say and to the left of the picture is Joan Wright in a blue with a little pattern on it jacket. Next to her is Brian Ingram; back view of [information withheld] in the skirt; Donny Dibden is holding on to a grey pony – I’m sure it would be a stallion presented for the Passing; back view of David Stagg with the grey hair and to the right of the picture I think is probably Leonard.
CB: Yes, and where was this?
Caroline: That in my mind looks a bit like at The Bentley’s.
CB: Sixty-six (CS266) Oh, that’s a nice one.
Caroline: Erm, just a forest scene of cattle and how they browse on all sorts of vegetation, there sort of reaching up to feed on some oak leaves.
CB: Sixty-seven (CS267)
Caroline: Here’s another one of cattle, it’s probably the same cow browsing on the bilberries there. And, yeah, I mean they forage over many different types of vegetation.
CB: Sixty-eight (CS268)
Caroline: This was a freeze branding session we had at Bolderwood in the eighties. Our pound and crush was used and it was sort of a collective event because there’s different people here, you know, brought their cattle up to be freeze branded, quite something in the eighties in the time when hot branding was finished or stopped –
CB: Can I ask why?
Caroline: Mmm. Well, we were always told that it was because the mark of the brand, the cauterising the print of the brand on the cow’s skin ruined the most valuable bit of the hide of the cow, so the freeze branding came in as a form of ID of the cattle along the time in the eighties or it might even have been earlier than that, in the ‘seventies perhaps. And so it was quite a performance, getting hold of the dry ice which is a mixture of dry ice and methylated spirits which made the solution down incredibly cold, sort of -70 and then you put your bronze brand plates in the solution, made them incredibly cold and then you had to hold them on the cow’s skin for a good thirty seconds. Not everyone had the facilities to capture cattle in the way that we did at the time; I mean this looks very outdated now but at the time it was quite acceptable to use. And to hold them securely ‘cos the cows, once they started to feel the pain of the freezing going in on their rump, they started to jump about and wriggle about, yeah. So here in the picture, outside of the pound, I think that’s [information withheld], who was the brother of [information withheld] who was stood in the pound to the right of the picture and I think they worked together right to sort of retirement age and [information withheld] kept a few cows. They lived and they had lived for many years at Angels’ Farm, Pinkney Lane, Lyndhurst and we’ve been friendly with them a long time so when they found out we were doing some freeze branding or having a freeze branding session we all sort of collectively got together and did the session all together. The gentleman in the foreground is Les Maton, so my guess is he had some cattle there as well. He was a commoner from Burley.
CB: Okay, that’s lovely. Sixty-nine (CS269)
Caroline: What we have again another sort of collection of people: to the left of the picture was Richard stood in the orchard, barn in the background; it would have been the right side of the cow that would be branded The person and I think that’s probably [information withheld] astride the back end of the crush just clipping off a patch of hair that we could successfully or the brand could be successfully applied to the skin there. The person bending over the top of the crush I think is possibly Terry Jones as the agister and the two people on the sort of right side – certainly the furthest one is [information withheld]; now whether the person in the foreground on the outside the orchard boundary is [information withheld]
CB: I think it’s [information withheld], I think it is –
Caroline: Mmm. He’s got another son as well, [information withheld].
CB: Oh, okay –
Caroline: Yeah, so I’m not sure, but