History of Gargunnock Farmers' Club
by Susanna Wade Martins
Gargunnock Farmers’ Club is one of the oldest in Scotland. Founded in 1794, its list of secretaries goes back to 1796. The lean years of the early 1780s resulted in increased interest in improved agriculture. Landlords, anxious to keep rents up were keen to encourage ‘improvement’ and attract like-minded tenants. One result of this was the setting up of farmers’ clubs and agricultural societies.
The earliest of these societies were founded on a national scale with the ‘The Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture in Scotland’ being established in Edinburgh in 1724. From enthusiastic beginnings it had petered out by the 1750s. One of its aims was to encourage local clubs and in 1730 a farmers’ club was set up in East Lothian, but did not outlast the enthusiasm of its founder, and others with equally short lives have been identified in Ayrshire, and Renfrewshire.
The first of the new wave of societies was the Highland and Agricultural Society, founded in 1784 with the initial aim of improvement in the Highlands which had suffered particularly badly in the previous years. Interest soon expanded to cover the whole of Scotland and it held regular meetings in the capital, offering prizes and grants for the development of new inventions and improvements which would benefit agriculture as well as for the improvement of stock.
Volumes of prize essays were published from 1799. Its members were men of influence from all over the country who would go back to their estates and
encourage their tenants to compete for the prizes. This early interest is reflected in the founding of Europe’s first chair of Agriculture at Edinburgh in 1790.
The establishment of a national society stimulated interest in the founding of local ones. By the 1790s, farm prices were improving and the outbreak of war with France meant food was scarce and farmers prospered which encouraged the growth of clubs such as the Gargunnock. Gargunnock may well be unique in that the records of this still flourishing club go back to its foundation. These consist of a collection of letters and notes of meetings from 1796 to 1817 and then minute books from 1847 to the present. It was founded in 1794 by John Fletcher Campbell of Boquhan. In 1784, the Clackmannanshire Club had been founded and it was there that Campbell looked when seeking a model for his and so he sent for its rules. Their activities consisted of four dinners a year at which members wore blue coats and scarlet waistcoats with buttons stamped with a plough and wheat stalk, as well as the running of ploughing matches. New members were proposed at one meeting and elected at the next. Their object was the ‘Improvement of Agriculture’.
Armed with this information, Campbell wrote the rules for Gargunnock. Membership was restricted to those living in St Ninians, Stirling, Gargunnock, Kippen, Fintry, Balfron, Port of Monteith, Drymen and Kincardine and meetings were occasionally held in each of these districts. ‘The design of the farmers’ club is to collect the knowledge of facts chiefly with regard to agriculture and to judge of what improvements may be introduced with success in this part of the country, each member furnishing information in particular that falls under his own experience and is connected with his situation and profession, the effect also of which it is to be hoped will be to connect the Tenant with the Landlord as members of the same society’.
Meetings were to be once a quarter. The initial membership was 23, but when it reached 30 (later increased to 40) the role was closed and new members
were admitted by ballot. A small mahogany inlaid ballot box survives amongst the records. Membership included landowners, farmers and members of
other professions, such as clergymen, medical men, surveyors, engineers, merchants and manufacturers who could be useful to farmers. The 1827
membership list included seven honourary members of whom two (the Duke of Montrose and Lord Keith) were of the aristocracy while Henry Hume Drummond of Blair Drummond had joined in 1823. There was one surgeon, one clergyman, two ‘writers’ and John Smith of the Deanston iron foundry and inventor of the sub-soil plough. The quarterly meeting consisted of a dinner and discussion. At these dinners, the president was to promote ‘cheerfulness
and good humour while preserving decency and mutual respect’. Grace was to be said before dinner. Many clubs included in their rules the forbidding of
political discussion, but this is not stipulated at Gargunnock. Ill feeling at dinners seems to have been the result of disagreements over who should pay for guests’ rather than politics. Members were expected to come suitably attired in coats of Presbyterian blue with silver buttons on which was engraved the club’s emblem. Expenses were not to exceed a shilling each for dinner and one and sixpence for drinks. In 1797, it was agreed that the subscription should be four shillings a year to include dinner, but not drinks. A cash book for 1806 shows the cost of dinners. The only other major expenditure at this time was prize money. At this time five guineas was awarded for the best bull, with three guineas for the second and two guineas for the third prizes. For the first time, because the Club wanted to encourage the introduction of the Ayrshire breed into the award, there were also prizes for Ayrshire bulls. By 1816, the subscription seems to have been eleven shillings to cover the cost of prizes and premiums as well as dinner.
Little is known about the club’s founder. A portrait of him, once owned by the club, seems to have been lost. Like many land owners, John Fletcher Campbell spent much of his active life away from his estates. He was an army general based in London when he was not on active service. His estate was managed by the Reverend Tait of Kincardine and in a letter to him in 1794 Campbell discusses the feeding of bulls, the seeding of the carse and the letting of the Mains Farm. Tait was also an early secretary of the Club, dying in office in 1812 ‘owing a considerable amount to the club’.
During the first fifty years of its existence the club was responsible for promoting a whole range of activities. It followed the example of the Clackmannan Club, where the earliest ploughing matches in Scotland had been held in 1784, and so organised its own. The matches in 1804, 1805 and 1807 were specifically to prepare a drill for turnips. In 1804 there were 19 entries. The furrow should be five inches deep and nine inches broad and whoever was
straightest and nearest the gauge would win. At meetings in 1814 and 1816 it was decided not to hold the match that year as work on the farms was so
backward as a result of the stormy weather. A notice for the 1823 ploughing match lists prizes of between one pound and five shillings. ‘No Ploughman will receive a Prize, but such as perform their Work at the rate of an Acte in Ten Hours and Half’ By 1855, entrants had to be ‘regular servants’. A competitor who was ‘merely a weekly servant’ was disqualified. A further incentive to farm servants staying on the same farm was given by a premium to the servant who had been ploughman on a member’s farm for the longest.
However to qualify, a certificate of moral character had to be produced. In 1817, the premium was won by Mr Spicer’s servant who had ‘held the plough for twenty years’. This effort to include a moral element into the prizes was typical of the clubs in both England and Scotland and reached its most popular in the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1847 Gargunnock was offering a premium to ‘the farm servant under twenty five years of age who has conducted himself with the greatest propriety for the longest period’.
As well as ploughing matches there were also trials of new implements such as ploughs. In 1833 eleven ploughs were tried by John Smith of Deanston, the author of the influential Thorough Drainage and Deep Ploughing, published in that year, and three other farmers. Four were wooden and seven made of iron. The depth of the furrows were all measured using a ‘dynanometer’ or draught measurer.
Although the iron ploughs were heavier it appeared that the differences in the draught were due to the ‘mode of setting the irons, so as to raise a sharp shoulder on the furrow’ rather than the material of which they were made.
Other trials include the testing of the ‘Hainault scythe’ in 1827.This followed on an experiment by the Highland Society of 1825 who had carried out a trial at Blair Drummond on the 29th August. The scythe was a small version of the large implement with which we are familiar and there was no cradle for taking holding the cut crop. ‘The work was pronounced to be superior in regard to close cutting and clean gathering to that of the sickle and the swathe laid in complete order for the binders. They (the committee) do not consider the instrument as one likely to be used by women’ Using the scythe reduced
cutting time by a half, however, but it was not as useful as a sickle on aid corn. There were six competitors in the Gargunnock trial and James Smith of Deanston was a judge. An average of ‘ten falls per thirty minutes, cut bound and stacked, was achieved, with only six falls of ‘difficult barley’. It was agreed that the Hainault was superior when cutting strong and even crops as in the Netherlands, but that it was not suited to local conditions where the crop had often been flattened by the weather.
Other premiums were offered for standing crops and so field inspections of wheat, hay and turnips were regularly reported on in the early 1800s. Prizes were awarded to the best stallions and bulls, but there is no indication that a regular show was run in the early years. Although one of the stated aims of the club was the presentation of papers, the reading of only two is recorded. In October 1805 the Reverend Tait read General Campbell’s treatise on the expelling crows from fields and woods and Mr Spears on the level of rent a tenant near Glasgow could afford to pay. In 1814 the club received an advertisement for Sir John Sinclair’s General Report on Scotland (three volumes), which they appear to have bought, as in February 1816, it was reported that the members north of the Teith had not as yet finished reading it and requested retaining it until the next meeting, on the understanding that it would be forwarded from one to another. This along with Thomson’s Chemistry, White’s Farriery and Munro’s Guide to Farm Bookkeeping was the extent of the club’s library.
While primarily concerned with things agricultural, the club rose to the crisis of the Napoleonic wars and agreed to form a militia in case of invasion. All those between 16 and 50 would enroll under General Campbell and Colonel Eglington of Gargunnock. Members would also provide transport in the form of horses and carts for his majesty’s troops if required.
It appears therefore that in its early years the club was involved in a variety of activities typical of such societies with ploughing matches and dinners being the most important. However, even the dinners were sometimes rather poorly attended with only six members present being recorded on several occasions.
Membership was dominated by the large farmers and landowners, and how far it succeeded in its aim of providing a link between the two groups is
impossible to tell from the surviving evidence.
There is a thirty-year gap in the record from 1817 to 1847 when the second volume of the minute book begins. Unfortunately volume one is missing. By this date there had been many changes with the functions of the club as they became similar to those it performs today. The annual show was now well-established with classes for Clydesdale horses and both Ayrshire and shorthorn bulls and cows, as well as for butter and cheese. Prizes for implements included ones for drainage ploughs and a ‘green crop grubber’. Ploughing matches were still important, but the field inspections had ceased. Instead there was a prize for ‘the best three turnips exhibited at the November meeting’. However, the dinners were not well attended and in 1859, they were reduced to three a year and in 1875 the December meeting was also discontinued. Of the two remaining dinners, one was held on the same day as the show which continued to grow in importance. More classes were added. In 1859 poultry were added to the list of prizes and finally, in 1913, sheep were included, an
indication of the changes in the emphasis of carse farming to include them in the system. Classes specifically designed for farmers’ wives were also
included with oatcakes, scones, ginger and sponge cakes alongside butter, cheese and eggs. In 1933 collie dogs were included for the first time. In 1962 Friesian cows and in 1968 beef cattle, Suffolk sheep and donkeys gained classes of their own. Gradually various sporting events were also introduced with musical chairs on horseback being included in 1927 for the first time. Musical chairs in cars lasted until the 1990s when it was banned on safety grounds. ‘Dr Guthrie’s band of boy pipers and dancers from Liberton, Edinburgh’ played at the centenary show in 1894 and the providing of a band was much debated at show meetings throughout the 1920s and ‘30s with one being hired in some years, but not in others. As the importance of working horses declined, that of riding ponies increased. In 1969 the pony riding class was split in two. Today’s club is very different from that of the 1850s. Membership is no longer restricted to 40 or to those living in the immediate Gargunnock area, but it remains a confined show. The show includes a much greater variety of classes and while the number of children’s ponies has increased, farm stock still plays a very important part. The Gargunnock show is still a significant event in the local farming calendar and is attended by both urban and farming folk.
Whilst its original aim was the improving of agriculture and the informing of farmers, it is now a means by which the farming community can keep in touch with the public at large.
There have been very few years in which the show has not been held. In October 1917, the president, Mr Sands spoke of ‘the serious times we are living through owing to the war and said that, although it had been decided at the AGM to hold the show as usual, since then, things, instead of improving, had even turned worse, and he thought that owing to the scarcities of labour and other circumstances, it would be advisable to abandon the show’. This was also agreed for 1918, but it was revived in 1919. Similarly, no show was held in 1940 or 1941. Foot and mouth closed it in 1952 and 2001.
List of items on the Gargunnock Farmers’ Club kist
by Susanna Wade Martins
Gargunnock Farmers’ Club is one of the oldest in Scotland. Founded in 1794, its list of secretaries goes back to 1796. The lean years of the early 1780s resulted in increased interest in improved agriculture. Landlords, anxious to keep rents up were keen to encourage ‘improvement’ and attract like-minded tenants. One result of this was the setting up of farmers’ clubs and agricultural societies.
The earliest of these societies were founded on a national scale with the ‘The Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agriculture in Scotland’ being established in Edinburgh in 1724. From enthusiastic beginnings it had petered out by the 1750s. One of its aims was to encourage local clubs and in 1730 a farmers’ club was set up in East Lothian, but did not outlast the enthusiasm of its founder, and others with equally short lives have been identified in Ayrshire, and Renfrewshire.
The first of the new wave of societies was the Highland and Agricultural Society, founded in 1784 with the initial aim of improvement in the Highlands which had suffered particularly badly in the previous years. Interest soon expanded to cover the whole of Scotland and it held regular meetings in the capital, offering prizes and grants for the development of new inventions and improvements which would benefit agriculture as well as for the improvement of stock.
Volumes of prize essays were published from 1799. Its members were men of influence from all over the country who would go back to their estates and
encourage their tenants to compete for the prizes. This early interest is reflected in the founding of Europe’s first chair of Agriculture at Edinburgh in 1790.
The establishment of a national society stimulated interest in the founding of local ones. By the 1790s, farm prices were improving and the outbreak of war with France meant food was scarce and farmers prospered which encouraged the growth of clubs such as the Gargunnock. Gargunnock may well be unique in that the records of this still flourishing club go back to its foundation. These consist of a collection of letters and notes of meetings from 1796 to 1817 and then minute books from 1847 to the present. It was founded in 1794 by John Fletcher Campbell of Boquhan. In 1784, the Clackmannanshire Club had been founded and it was there that Campbell looked when seeking a model for his and so he sent for its rules. Their activities consisted of four dinners a year at which members wore blue coats and scarlet waistcoats with buttons stamped with a plough and wheat stalk, as well as the running of ploughing matches. New members were proposed at one meeting and elected at the next. Their object was the ‘Improvement of Agriculture’.
Armed with this information, Campbell wrote the rules for Gargunnock. Membership was restricted to those living in St Ninians, Stirling, Gargunnock, Kippen, Fintry, Balfron, Port of Monteith, Drymen and Kincardine and meetings were occasionally held in each of these districts. ‘The design of the farmers’ club is to collect the knowledge of facts chiefly with regard to agriculture and to judge of what improvements may be introduced with success in this part of the country, each member furnishing information in particular that falls under his own experience and is connected with his situation and profession, the effect also of which it is to be hoped will be to connect the Tenant with the Landlord as members of the same society’.
Meetings were to be once a quarter. The initial membership was 23, but when it reached 30 (later increased to 40) the role was closed and new members
were admitted by ballot. A small mahogany inlaid ballot box survives amongst the records. Membership included landowners, farmers and members of
other professions, such as clergymen, medical men, surveyors, engineers, merchants and manufacturers who could be useful to farmers. The 1827
membership list included seven honourary members of whom two (the Duke of Montrose and Lord Keith) were of the aristocracy while Henry Hume Drummond of Blair Drummond had joined in 1823. There was one surgeon, one clergyman, two ‘writers’ and John Smith of the Deanston iron foundry and inventor of the sub-soil plough. The quarterly meeting consisted of a dinner and discussion. At these dinners, the president was to promote ‘cheerfulness
and good humour while preserving decency and mutual respect’. Grace was to be said before dinner. Many clubs included in their rules the forbidding of
political discussion, but this is not stipulated at Gargunnock. Ill feeling at dinners seems to have been the result of disagreements over who should pay for guests’ rather than politics. Members were expected to come suitably attired in coats of Presbyterian blue with silver buttons on which was engraved the club’s emblem. Expenses were not to exceed a shilling each for dinner and one and sixpence for drinks. In 1797, it was agreed that the subscription should be four shillings a year to include dinner, but not drinks. A cash book for 1806 shows the cost of dinners. The only other major expenditure at this time was prize money. At this time five guineas was awarded for the best bull, with three guineas for the second and two guineas for the third prizes. For the first time, because the Club wanted to encourage the introduction of the Ayrshire breed into the award, there were also prizes for Ayrshire bulls. By 1816, the subscription seems to have been eleven shillings to cover the cost of prizes and premiums as well as dinner.
Little is known about the club’s founder. A portrait of him, once owned by the club, seems to have been lost. Like many land owners, John Fletcher Campbell spent much of his active life away from his estates. He was an army general based in London when he was not on active service. His estate was managed by the Reverend Tait of Kincardine and in a letter to him in 1794 Campbell discusses the feeding of bulls, the seeding of the carse and the letting of the Mains Farm. Tait was also an early secretary of the Club, dying in office in 1812 ‘owing a considerable amount to the club’.
During the first fifty years of its existence the club was responsible for promoting a whole range of activities. It followed the example of the Clackmannan Club, where the earliest ploughing matches in Scotland had been held in 1784, and so organised its own. The matches in 1804, 1805 and 1807 were specifically to prepare a drill for turnips. In 1804 there were 19 entries. The furrow should be five inches deep and nine inches broad and whoever was
straightest and nearest the gauge would win. At meetings in 1814 and 1816 it was decided not to hold the match that year as work on the farms was so
backward as a result of the stormy weather. A notice for the 1823 ploughing match lists prizes of between one pound and five shillings. ‘No Ploughman will receive a Prize, but such as perform their Work at the rate of an Acte in Ten Hours and Half’ By 1855, entrants had to be ‘regular servants’. A competitor who was ‘merely a weekly servant’ was disqualified. A further incentive to farm servants staying on the same farm was given by a premium to the servant who had been ploughman on a member’s farm for the longest.
However to qualify, a certificate of moral character had to be produced. In 1817, the premium was won by Mr Spicer’s servant who had ‘held the plough for twenty years’. This effort to include a moral element into the prizes was typical of the clubs in both England and Scotland and reached its most popular in the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1847 Gargunnock was offering a premium to ‘the farm servant under twenty five years of age who has conducted himself with the greatest propriety for the longest period’.
As well as ploughing matches there were also trials of new implements such as ploughs. In 1833 eleven ploughs were tried by John Smith of Deanston, the author of the influential Thorough Drainage and Deep Ploughing, published in that year, and three other farmers. Four were wooden and seven made of iron. The depth of the furrows were all measured using a ‘dynanometer’ or draught measurer.
Although the iron ploughs were heavier it appeared that the differences in the draught were due to the ‘mode of setting the irons, so as to raise a sharp shoulder on the furrow’ rather than the material of which they were made.
Other trials include the testing of the ‘Hainault scythe’ in 1827.This followed on an experiment by the Highland Society of 1825 who had carried out a trial at Blair Drummond on the 29th August. The scythe was a small version of the large implement with which we are familiar and there was no cradle for taking holding the cut crop. ‘The work was pronounced to be superior in regard to close cutting and clean gathering to that of the sickle and the swathe laid in complete order for the binders. They (the committee) do not consider the instrument as one likely to be used by women’ Using the scythe reduced
cutting time by a half, however, but it was not as useful as a sickle on aid corn. There were six competitors in the Gargunnock trial and James Smith of Deanston was a judge. An average of ‘ten falls per thirty minutes, cut bound and stacked, was achieved, with only six falls of ‘difficult barley’. It was agreed that the Hainault was superior when cutting strong and even crops as in the Netherlands, but that it was not suited to local conditions where the crop had often been flattened by the weather.
Other premiums were offered for standing crops and so field inspections of wheat, hay and turnips were regularly reported on in the early 1800s. Prizes were awarded to the best stallions and bulls, but there is no indication that a regular show was run in the early years. Although one of the stated aims of the club was the presentation of papers, the reading of only two is recorded. In October 1805 the Reverend Tait read General Campbell’s treatise on the expelling crows from fields and woods and Mr Spears on the level of rent a tenant near Glasgow could afford to pay. In 1814 the club received an advertisement for Sir John Sinclair’s General Report on Scotland (three volumes), which they appear to have bought, as in February 1816, it was reported that the members north of the Teith had not as yet finished reading it and requested retaining it until the next meeting, on the understanding that it would be forwarded from one to another. This along with Thomson’s Chemistry, White’s Farriery and Munro’s Guide to Farm Bookkeeping was the extent of the club’s library.
While primarily concerned with things agricultural, the club rose to the crisis of the Napoleonic wars and agreed to form a militia in case of invasion. All those between 16 and 50 would enroll under General Campbell and Colonel Eglington of Gargunnock. Members would also provide transport in the form of horses and carts for his majesty’s troops if required.
It appears therefore that in its early years the club was involved in a variety of activities typical of such societies with ploughing matches and dinners being the most important. However, even the dinners were sometimes rather poorly attended with only six members present being recorded on several occasions.
Membership was dominated by the large farmers and landowners, and how far it succeeded in its aim of providing a link between the two groups is
impossible to tell from the surviving evidence.
There is a thirty-year gap in the record from 1817 to 1847 when the second volume of the minute book begins. Unfortunately volume one is missing. By this date there had been many changes with the functions of the club as they became similar to those it performs today. The annual show was now well-established with classes for Clydesdale horses and both Ayrshire and shorthorn bulls and cows, as well as for butter and cheese. Prizes for implements included ones for drainage ploughs and a ‘green crop grubber’. Ploughing matches were still important, but the field inspections had ceased. Instead there was a prize for ‘the best three turnips exhibited at the November meeting’. However, the dinners were not well attended and in 1859, they were reduced to three a year and in 1875 the December meeting was also discontinued. Of the two remaining dinners, one was held on the same day as the show which continued to grow in importance. More classes were added. In 1859 poultry were added to the list of prizes and finally, in 1913, sheep were included, an
indication of the changes in the emphasis of carse farming to include them in the system. Classes specifically designed for farmers’ wives were also
included with oatcakes, scones, ginger and sponge cakes alongside butter, cheese and eggs. In 1933 collie dogs were included for the first time. In 1962 Friesian cows and in 1968 beef cattle, Suffolk sheep and donkeys gained classes of their own. Gradually various sporting events were also introduced with musical chairs on horseback being included in 1927 for the first time. Musical chairs in cars lasted until the 1990s when it was banned on safety grounds. ‘Dr Guthrie’s band of boy pipers and dancers from Liberton, Edinburgh’ played at the centenary show in 1894 and the providing of a band was much debated at show meetings throughout the 1920s and ‘30s with one being hired in some years, but not in others. As the importance of working horses declined, that of riding ponies increased. In 1969 the pony riding class was split in two. Today’s club is very different from that of the 1850s. Membership is no longer restricted to 40 or to those living in the immediate Gargunnock area, but it remains a confined show. The show includes a much greater variety of classes and while the number of children’s ponies has increased, farm stock still plays a very important part. The Gargunnock show is still a significant event in the local farming calendar and is attended by both urban and farming folk.
Whilst its original aim was the improving of agriculture and the informing of farmers, it is now a means by which the farming community can keep in touch with the public at large.
There have been very few years in which the show has not been held. In October 1917, the president, Mr Sands spoke of ‘the serious times we are living through owing to the war and said that, although it had been decided at the AGM to hold the show as usual, since then, things, instead of improving, had even turned worse, and he thought that owing to the scarcities of labour and other circumstances, it would be advisable to abandon the show’. This was also agreed for 1918, but it was revived in 1919. Similarly, no show was held in 1940 or 1941. Foot and mouth closed it in 1952 and 2001.
List of items on the Gargunnock Farmers’ Club kist
- 1990s Newspapers, Scottish Farmer and papers to do with the centenary show
- 1930-1990 Prize cards, old cheques etc. in yellow bag, misc. invoice
- Account book, 1934-1979
- Bundle of 1965 rule books
- 1900-1930 Account sheets 1919 and 1921
- Prize lists, 1909, 1913, 1914 (two copies), 1915, 1919, 1925, 1927, 1951 (two copies), 1954 (two copies), 1955 (two copies)
- Poster 1937
- 1800-1900 Three copies of 1888 rule book, three copies of rule book (no date)
- Advertisement for Sinclair’s General Report on Scotland,1814
- Ploughing match notice, 1823 (two copies)
- Show notice, 1809
- Prize list 1847 (two copies), 1846, 1848, 184?
- Photocopy of centenary show notice, 1894
- Highland Society report on the Flemish plough, 1825
- Cash book, 1806 and 1886-1896
- List of members of the East Salton Farmers’ Club 1804
- Rules of the Kippen and District Farmers’ Club 1894