what no one would believe before, that the Cotswold breed could when well managed show more increase of live weight per diem than any other, and that the supposed superiority of the Hampshiie downs in this respect was merely a question of feeding and management.
On other occasions in 1884 and 1885 I repeated this success, always with lambs, as I thought that the showing of wether sheep of such immense weights and fatness as all our improved English breeds now attain was a great waste of time and money, and that for a society like the Smithfield Club to encourage the production of animals absolutely useless except to hang as a butcher’s advertisement at Christmas meat shows was in principle quite wrong. The Council of the Society, however, with the extreme conservatism which has always marked the governing bodies of our Agricultural Societies and which thoroughly represents the ideas of the average British farmer, would have no such radical reform as this. Though at my suggestion they afterwards consented to divide the large and important class of cross-bred sheep into two so as to give a chance to the breeders of crosses from ewes of small mountain breeds to show what they could do, and though they have made a half-hearted attempt to show the public, by giving prizes for dressed carcases as well as live animals, what the meat of over-fatted animals is like, the Club still moves like the Royal Agricultural Society on ideas many of which are obsolete.
My object in showing was like that of most people who breed for profit, to advertise the flock and enable me to sell rams, and for two or three years I bad every reason to be satisfied with the results. But just as I began to know a little about the many obstacles which await the man who tries to move with or perhaps a little in advance of the times, the demand for heavy fat mutton began to fall off, and the popular taste moved rapidly in the direction of smaller and leaner mutton.
One of my first show lambs realised in Cirencester no less than £5 10s., being at ten months old 132 pounds dressed, at 10d. a pound. In 1882 I sold my culled ram tegs in the wool in the first week in February for £4 12s. apiece, and wool still made up to 30s. a tod. The year’s clip used to represent quite a nice fat cheque, and though some of one’s inferior rams had to go to the butcher they were always worth £5 to kill, whilst the better ones made at Gloucester market an average of £11. This paid very well, but when Australian mutton began to come in and the colliers and iron-workers, instead of ordering a thirty pound quarter of mutton for their week’s consumption, wanted small joints two or three times a week, and no longer digested the thick layers of fat with which our sheep’s backs and ribs were covered, the home demand for pure-bred Cotswolds fell off immensely.
There was still a local demand for Cotswold rams for crossing purposes which was over-supplied, and though ram breeders did their best to keep up a rather fictitious average price at their sales by buying fifty-guinea rams from each other, yet I saw that unless I could create a better demand for them from abroad or in Scotland the prices would go on falling. So I entered my sheep in the International Stock Shows at Hanover and Hamburg, won prizes and sold a certain number of rams in Germany and Russia, and looked about for customers in the Argentine
