50 years a member

50

years a member

1952 on Lavenham Farm harvesting (JRB centre)

AS I write a letter has arrived from 2021 Club Chairman Keith Redpath welcoming me into the category of Honorary Member, having completed 50 years as a member of the Club.

He sums up the ethos of the Club’s homefrom-home atmosphere, which I have so enjoyed for 50 years, all of which I spent in agricultural accountancy.

It all started in May1964 with Parker Edwards & Co of Preston, at the Worcester office, auditing farming cooperatives in the west of England, and beyond. Some of those coops had been clients since 1919, when the NFU supported the formation of cooperatives across the country.

I went on to form my own practice, Edwards Ruddock & Co, and was an active member of the Federation of Agricultural Cooperatives, finally retiring aged 78.

When my agricultural contacts were spreading in the late 1960s two friends sponsored me for Farmers Club membership. I had to wait two and a half years to get into the one-third farming-related category and was admitted on 15 December 1971 when W J Godber CBE was Chairman.

It seems the first formal Club event I attended was the Annual Dinner & Dance at Park Lane’s Grosvenor House on 6 December 1977, with 1,188 present, and the Prince of Wales and Sir Christopher Soames, Minister of Agriculture, as principal guests.

A regular summer joy was visiting the Club Pavilion at the Royal Show at Stoneleigh and much interest was gained from House of Lords lunches.

Over the years I worked for many agricultural clients large and small, including farmers with varied enterprises. But my specialism was co-ops, from Cornwall Farmers in Truro, via Carmarthen and Pumsaint in Wales, to Central Farmers at Methil in Fife, with the two biggest and most intricate being Midland Shires Farmers of Worcester and Stonegate Farmers in Sussex. I passed a collection of co-op annual accounts covering 71 different societies and companies to the Co-op Library in Manchester in 2004 and National Statistics have requested my results tables for 1975-1990 for 25-35 co-ops annually.

In 1989 a British Food & Farming Festival was held in Hyde Park, which I was honoured to assist Peter Jackson (Club Chairman 1996) in planning. My photograph of a floral float depicting a large chicken and a teddy bear in a cart (!) won the Club Photographic Competition and was published in Journal No 106 for Harvest 1990.

Stand-out Club tours included a visit to the 300-year old Admiralty Board Room in London and the 2006 Burns Night Dinner with full ‘Address to the Haggis’.

May the Club continue to flourish in central London premises and maintain its strong links with farming and agriculture generally.

James Ruddock-Broyd

FCA (retired), FRGS Rural West Oxfordshire

SUFFOLK FARMING

“Born in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August 1935, we moved in May 1940 to a house with a garden full of fruit trees in Melford Road at the end of which a bomb fell on 8 October 1940 so the garden was smothered with dangerous pieces of shrapnel. I have a vivid memory of 6 June 1944 (or very near) when the army convoy passing our house on the Bury St Edmunds to Colchester road was so dense with lorries they stopped for long periods and the soldiers did walkabouts. Mother sent me out with cups of tea and I asked where they were going; the reply came back: “We are following the vehicle in front” which was probably all they knew. My early excursions into the countryside were for blackberrying and I recall the lovely feeling of cycling down country lanes. A month after leaving school we went as a family to help with harvest at Preston, near Lavenham and I have a lovely photo with us beside tractor and trailer with sheaves 10ft high. I subsequently attended Framlingham College.”

RESISTANCE THOUGHTS

“I particularly remember visiting the Club on Remembrance Sunday in 2013 after marching with the Royal Signals Association. I found Philip Merricks with a large group of senior farmerlooking gents. They had marched for the first time as the British Resistance Organisation or Auxilieres. Philip’s father had served as one and they were indeed farmers from all over the country. They served in underground bunkers in WWII in readiness for a possible invasion and their work had only recently become public knowledge.”